Decision aid for planning the maintenance of electronic equipment in the German Army.

Abstract

In the early stage of the Weapons Acquisition Process (Concept Exploration and Concept Demonstration/Validation Phases) no exact and reliable data are available about expected Mean Times Between Failures (MTBF) and Mean Times to Repair (MTTR) for both the components of a new system or the new system itself. Nevertheless, appropriate decisions have to be made about the number of maintenance facilities at certain military command levels, about the needed quantity of (military and/or civilian) maintenance personnel, and about adequate spare stock levels at the appropriate locations. Wrong planning in this early stage can cause a degradation of the new system's future availability. This is problematic especially with electronic equipment, because maintenance personnel have to be highly specialized, and can not be replaced and retrained as easily as support personnel for trucks or tanks. A decision aid for the early stages of the acquisition process is needed that offers insight into the behavior of a multi-indenture level electronic system within a three echelon maintenance system, develops alternatives for upcoming decisions, and finally provides information about sensitive factors and their possible tradeoffs, essentially used in budgetary discussions. The purpose of this thesis is the exact definition of all relevant factors pertaining to the necessary decisions, the review of existing models and tools and their review for applicability. Because the modification of existing programs can not solve the whole scope of the problem due to the use of early generation computer languages, and due to the necessarily new and different approach to the topic, a new simulation program has to be developed. Using object oriented simulation language MODSIM-II, first steps towards this program are made, but remain to be improved and completed in further research work.