Reliability, Maintainability, and Supportability: Best Practices for Systems Engineers

11Design for Maintainability

11.1 WHAT TO EXPECT FROM THIS CHAPTER

Once a system’s maintainability requirements are known, properties of the system need to be arranged so that the requirements will be satisfied. Deliberate actions must be taken to guide the system to a state in which it is likely that fulfillment of its maintainability requirements will become more than a fervent hope. This chapter reviews design for maintainability techniques, including

• Quantitative maintainability modeling,
• Level of repair analysis (LoRA),
• Preventive maintenance,
• Reliability-centered maintenance (RCM).

Each of these is intended to add features, properties, and characteristics to the system’s design that will enhance its ability to be repaired quickly, inexpensively, and with few errors.

11.2 SYSTEM OR SERVICE MAINTENANCE CONCEPT

Try as we may to design for reliability to prevent failures, it is rare that we are completely successful. So when planning a new system, product, or service, it is a good idea to pay attention to how the system, product, or service will be repaired and restored to operation when it fails (corrective maintenance) and to procedures needed for preventing failures after the system is in operation (preventive maintenance). In more formal terms, when we begin to design a system, we also create the beginnings of a plan for how that system will be maintained. This plan is called the system maintenance concept.

As noted in Section 10.2.2, the system maintenance concept addresses ...