Multi-Attribute Reliability and Maintainability Engineering Assessment Methodology

The DoD’s supply chain provides materiel and logistics services to units throughout the world, and consists of support contractors, retail supply activities, distribution depots, transportation networks, materiel managers, weapon system program offices, commercial distributors and suppliers, commercial and organic maintenance facilities, and other logistics activities (e.g., engineering support, test facilities, catalog services, reutilization and marketing offices). These organizations and functions must work in concert to provide responsive, consistent, and reliable support to the war fighter. The Supply Chain Management challenge is to meet the DoD’s needs for rapid power projection and improved readiness, while at the same time minimizing the total investment in the supply chain inventory and support infrastructure. The objective of this Phase I SBIR is to develop and integrate systems engineering based methods and techniques that will provide an end-to-end, multi attribute reliability and maintainability assessment tool suite. The resulting system will be able to model the baseline system’s health and quantify the effects of proposed supply chain improvements. These results will be combined with cost, schedule and risk assessments to provide a multi-dimensional view of the system trade-offs. Portfolio optimization techniques will then determine how to maximize system performance and availability, while minimizing cost and risk. BENEFIT: This research is applicable to the DoD and commercial industries employing complex supply chain management systems to maintain expensive systems. These organizations routinely make decisions where and how much money to invest in new technologies, development of new systems, and sustainment of older systems. Understanding how these investments will affect their overall operations and financial bottom line is critical. Insight into the complex interrelationships between system performance, reliability, availability, maintainability, and affordability will enable these organizations to save millions while maintaining the required operational tempo and customer satisfaction. This research is also applicable to system prime contractors and original equipment manufacturers. The tools and techniques proposed here would greatly enhance their ability to conduct design trade-offs early in the system development life cycle when key system characteristics are still being defined. Opportunities to improve system performance and reduce operations and support cost diminish dramatically once the initial conceptual designs and attendant enabling technologies are chosen. Not only can the system design be optimized, but so too can the repair, overhaul, maintenance and supply chain systems by insuring resources are allocated in such a way as to maximize system performance and availability while minimizing costs and risk.