DMTrade - a Rolls-Royce Tool for Modelling Lifetime Reliability and Maintenance Cost for a Complex Repairable System

摘要

For complex repairable products, the lifetime reliability and maintenance cost attributes are a complex function of the component reliability distributions and the selected maintenance strategy. Understanding and accommodating this complexity is key when some components exhibit wearout, others fail randomly, and still others exhibit infant mortality. Further complications arise when some failure modes are more costly to repair than others, thereby having a disproportionate impact on lifetime maintenance cost. To fully consider these complexities, Rolls-Royce Corporation has developed DMTrade, a Monte Carlo simulation tool to simulate a product through its lifetime of failures, repairs, and scheduled maintenance. For a given product design and maintenance strategy, the simulation predicts 1) when the product will fail, 2) what failure mode causes the failure, 3) what repairs are needed, 4) what proactive repairs are performed, and 5) the cost of those repairs. Through iterative use of DMTrade, designers can identify design improvement opportunities with highest benefit to system level reliability and/or lifetime maintenance cost. Similarly, maintenance planners can use DMTrade to determine the optimum balance of reactive, opportunistic, and proactive maintenance. This paper will illustrate the use of DMTrade by applying it to a fictitious product with eight components and a baseline "fix only what's broke" maintenance strategy. Subsequent DMTrade iterations will be used to identify the highest value improvement opportunities, both for product design and maintenance strategy.