A Simulation Study Of Military Land Equipment Availability Under Corrective And Preventive Maintenance Regimes

This paper presents a simulation study for military land equipment operational availability (OA). A discrete event simulation model was developed within this study to support the analysis of the effect of several maintenance regimes on OA namely Corrective Maintenance (CM), Scheduled Preventive Maintenance (SPM), and Condition-Based Maintenance (CBM). The model was implemented using the ARENA environment and simulations were run with various probability distributions for the various process durations such as task duration, time between failure, repair time, supply delay and non-operating time. The maintenance “cost” metric has been considered in this model. The results indicate that the simulation model capture the important trends of an OA such as military land systems for the CM, SPM and CBM regimes. The simulations results showed that as time between repairs becomes larger, the SPM triggers less often, so CBM catches more failures. The results showed also that the way the three maintenance regimes (CM, CBM, and SPM) interact can be complex, particularly because parts can fail during a task. Many possible improvements were identified, at the design, implementation, and results levels.