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

10Maintainability Requirements

10.1 WHAT TO EXPECT FROM THIS CHAPTER

We pass now to the second major division of this book. Maintainability is the second of the three sustainability disciplines that form a major part of the system engineer’s responsibilities and skills regarding continued satisfactory operation of a system or service beyond its initial installation. These disciplines pertain to the actions that need to be taken during design and development to ensure that a system or service will continue to operate properly and profitably throughout its intended life. This chapter begins the study of maintainability by first achieving an understanding of maintainability as a system property and then devising maintainability effectiveness criteria and figures of merit that are consistent with this understanding. Both corrective and preventive maintenance are covered. We are then in a position to deal with maintainability requirements. Examples of maintainability requirements and their interpretation are discussed. A review of contemporary best practices in developing maintainability requirements and a summary of the chapter bring the chapter to a close and prepare for the design for maintainability material in Chapter 11.

10.2 MAINTAINABILITY FOR SYSTEMS ENGINEERS

10.2.1 Definitions

We discussed reliability at length in Part I of this book. If a system or service is designed for reliability, then the number of system or service failures (requirements violations) should be ...