Incorporating Reliability Improvement and Fleet Maintenance into Rotorcraft Tradespace Tools

Tradespace exploration (TSE) promises to support the development of processes and products capable of performing in a wide range of conditions. Past research themes include visualization tools to compare alternative designs, methods to ascribe value to these designs, and models to characterize the impact of non-functional requirements such as reliability, availability, and maintainability. While some TSE tools incorporate one or more of these aspects, simultaneous consideration of technical and financial feasibility as well as potential usage profiles can offer a more thorough understanding of alternative designs. Toward this end, this paper demonstrates the feasibility of incorporating quantitative reliability improvement models into the Capability Assessment and Tradeoff Environment (CATE), a GUI based, rapid prototyping TSE tool for rotorcraft. The illustrations demonstrate the capability of the approach to identify optimal reliability investment to minimize average fleet and system maintenance cost as well as the ability to conduct tradeoff studies between performance measures defined in CATE and the cost measures developed here. These methods can promote more comprehensive tradespace analysis considering performance, reliability, and cost related system attributes as well as their strategic implications.