A discrete-event simulator for predicting outage time and costs as a function of maintenance resources

With the increasing air traffic and growth of deployed FAA equipment, high equipment availability and low outage time is also becoming more important. While the use of simulation models and simple queuing models for assessing the impact of staffing on availability has been available for more than 5 decades, it has not been widely used because of the cost and complexity of implementation. This paper presents an analytical model and software tool that can be used by non-experts to relate FAA maintenance resources including staffing, training, shift allocation, and geographical deployment to National Airspace System (NAS) facility and service downtime and availability. The analytical methodology and tool presented in this paper make it possible for any user to rapidly assess how changes in staffing, training. equipment count, and reliability will impact outage time, availability, maintenance backlog and technician utilization. It allows users to easily perform parametric studies on a variety of "what if" scenarios related to economics and capacity. The most significant benefit is that these results can now be made available to analysts and decision makers. The net result will be more informed decisions to account for the impact of maintenance resources on NAS capacity and overall economics.