Maintainability

Abstract

Maintainability is defined as ‘the probability that a repair action will restore a failed system to full working order within a given period of time’. It is thus closely analogous to reliability since both are probabilities which vary with time. The chief difference conceptually between maintainability and reliability is that in general there are more trade-offs that can be made in the former (number of repairmen, skill of repairmen, number of repair centres, number of modules held in repair stock, provision of alarms in the system, maintenance schedules etc.) than in the latter.