Professional Documents
Culture Documents
The following is an excerpt from The Reliability Engineering Handbook by Bryan Dodson and
Dennis Nolan, QA Publishing, LLC.
Many systems are repairable; when the system fails whether it is an automobile, a
dishwasher, production equipment, etc. it is repaired. Maintainability is a measure of the
difficulty to repair the system. More specifically, maintainability is:
The measure of the ability of a system to be retained in, or restored to, a specified condition
when maintenance is performed by personnel having specified skill levels, using prescribed
procedures and resources, at each prescribed level of maintenance and repair.
Military Handbook 472 (MIL-HDBK-472) defines six components of maintainability, which
are discussed below.
1. Elemental Activities are simple maintenance actions of short duration and
relatively small variance that do not vary appreciably from one system to another.
An example of an elemental activity is the opening and shutting of a door.
2. Malfunction Active Repair Time consists of:
a. Preparation time
b. Malfunction verification time
c. Fault location time
d. Part procurement time
e. Repair time
f. Final malfunction test time
Items af above are composed of elemental activities.
3. Malfunction Repair Time consists of:
a. Malfunction active repair time
b. Malfunction administrative time
4. System Repair Time is the product of malfunction repair time and the number of
malfunctions.
5. System Downtime includes:
1. System logistic time
2. System repair time
It is important to note that the type of availability being described is often not distinguished.
Many authors simply refer to "availability," MTTR may be the equivalent of MMT or MDT,
and MTBF may be the equivalent MTMA.