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In recent years managers and professionals working in the rapidly developing field of systems engineering have made substantial revisions in two important aspects of their work: selection of metrics and redefining the work scope of program sponsors and acquisition managers. As it is mentioned in “Defense Acquisition Guidebook”, DoD Directive 5000.01 requires Program Managers to: "develop and implement performance-based logistics strategies that optimize total system availability while minimizing cost and logistics footprint." It also requires that: "Planning for Operation and Support and the estimation of total ownership costs shall begin as early as possible. Supportability, a key component of performance, shall be considered throughout the system life cycle."
“Operational Availability Handbook” prepared by Reliability Analysis Center states that “Project Managers must be able to access system performance readiness metrics during the acquisition process, prior to initial operational capability (IOC), and throughout the deployment cycle, providing feedback critical to ensuring that the user can affordably support the system.” Again, it identifies the operational availability of systems as a “key to an organization's ability to be successful while minimizing cost”.
Thus, while a number of metrics may be relevant in a specific project, the systems availability (and usually a time-dependent availability) is of particular interest for program sponsors and acquisition managers. However, analytic calculations of availability are not practical except in the simplest cases (such as when only exponential distributions are involved). For instance, even the expression for availability of an individual component takes a form of an infinite sum of multi-dimensional convolution integrals. The only method allowing for correct calculation of systems availability in complex practical situations is a Monte Carlo method, i.e. a stochastic simulation.
"Develop and implement performance-based logistics strategies that optimize total system availability while minimizing cost and logistics footprint."
"Planning for Operation and Support and the estimation of total ownership costs shall begin as early as possible"
A.D. Achlama is a provider of consulting services for Systems and Logistics Engineering. We develop, market, and support Annabelle - the most advanced and powerful software available for evaluating requirements and performance of complex systems, such as defense systems, communication systems, transport systems or industrial plants.
Annabelle allows describing the system in terms of its hierarchical structure, and simulating its behavior for any given scenario of design, operations, and maintenance parameters. Annabelle uses time-dependent Monte Carlo techniques to simulate the behavior of the modeled system. This is the tool allowing to correctly evaluate availability and other parameters in complicated real-life situations. In what follows the steps of a typical modeling project performed by A.D. Achlama are outlined.
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