An exploratory analysis of corrective maintenance during extended surface ship deployments

Abstract

This thesis illustrates the use of simulation techniques to evaluate the corrective maintenance requirements, and resulting operational availability on-station, for a ship deployed for an extended period of three years. The Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) Strategic Studies Group (SSG) in 1997 has proposed to deploy ships for three year periods and rotate crews. This concept is called Horizon. An object-oriented, discrete-event simulation is written in Java to simulate aspects of this extended deployment model. The simulation estimates the mean on and off station times of the ship, the mean time between shore-based repair, and the mean operational availability of the ship on station. The simulation allows a user to input as many ship systems with independent failure characteristics as desired, and evaluates a single-ship three year deployment. The simulation allows the user to perform sensitivity analysis on the input values to determine the significance of the results based upon the measures of the model. This thesis shows the effects of the inputs of the mean time-to- failure, logistics delay time, and percent of organic repair of the ship.