Abstract
KEYWORDS:
maintainability, vehicle testing, repair times.
ABSTRACT:
When developing a motor vehicle, several tests should be developed, aiming at checking its abilities to meet the hardware and software demands. The maintainability engineer must be involved in the test planning process, such that provisions can be made to collect maintainability-related information that will assist in the evaluation of the vehicle maintainability design. Formal maintainability testing should be planned using standardized methods such as test on chargeable maintenance downtime per mission, test for main maintenance time, test on man-hour rate etc. A certain number of factors have their fundamental influence upon the method’s choose. This includes the index to be demonstrated, any assumptions about the statistical nature of the index as related to the test method requirements, the means by which sample maintenance tasks are selected, the number of maintenance tasks that must be demonstrated to obtain a statistically significant number of data samples, and the individual producer’s and consumer’s risk for some of the tests. The paper presents the testing algorithm of a vehicle's maintainability, the mathematical model that supports the algorithm and the results that have been obtained by applying it to a military vehicle.