Simulation of Maintenance Activities in the Grand Junction Sector

摘要

Air navigation, communication, radar, and other air traffic control facilities of the National Airspace System are maintained by the Federal Aviation Administration's Airway Facilities Service (AAF). MITRE previously developed a computer simulation which emulates the maintenance activities in a typical class of AAF maintenance sectors. The simulation was verified by applying it to the FAA sector with headquarters at Roanoke, Virginia. This computer program provides a detailed simulation of the time technicians spend on preventive and corrective maintenance tasks and associated travel. The simulation may thus be used as an analytical tool for testing the operational feasibility of new maintenance organizational concepts before introducing them into field operations. This report describes the generalization and extension of the Roanoke Simulation to the AAF maintenance sector with headquarters at Grand Junction, Colorado. Simulation results for Grand Junction, where facilities are more widely dispersed than in the Roanoke type of AAF sector, are compared with previous results for Roanoke, where travel does not contribute so heavily to technician workload. Results are also presented for a hypothetical experiment in which the amount of time required to perform each maintenance task in Grand Junction was based on the National Staffing Standard Study average, rather than on field data taken in the Grand Junction Sector.