Reliability and Maintainability Evaluation of the Tower Cab Digital Display System

摘要

A reliability and maintainability evaluation was performed on eight Tower Cab Digital Display (TCDD) systems located at four Florida air traffic control (ATC) facilities. Data were collected between August 25, 1979, and February 29, 1980. Analysis of these data showed that 21 chargeable hardware failures occurred (excluding the telephone lines). This corresponds to an overall system mean-time-between-failures (MTBF) of 1,001 hours and a mean-time-to-repair (MTTR) of 2.9 hours. In addition to the chargeable hardware failures, many system outages which could be attributed to transitory, environmental, or undefined causes occurred. These outages included noisy telephone lines, frequent automatic restarts, and high ambient room temperatures. The measured MTBF for a subset of the system was found to be lower than the corresponding predicted value. The 2.9-hour measured MTTR is considered excessive. Recommended actions for several design changes are included. (Author)