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Sustainment Strategies for System Performance Enhancement

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Abstract

“Sustainment” (as commonly defined by industry and government) is comprised of maintenance, support, and upgrade practices that maintain or improve the performance of a system and maximize the availability of goods and services while minimizing their cost and footprint or, more simply, the capacity of a system to endure. System sustainment is a multitrillion-dollar enterprise, in government (infrastructure and defense) and industry (transportation, industrial controls, data centers, and others). Systems associated with human safety, the delivery of critical services, important humanitarian, and military missions and global economic stability are often compromised by the failure to develop, resource, and implement effective long-term sustainment strategies. System sustainment is, unfortunately, an area that has traditionally been dominated by transactional processes with little strategic planning, policy, or methodological support. This chapter discusses the definition of sustainment and the relationship of sustainment to system resilience, the economics of sustainment (i.e., making business cases to strategically sustain systems), policies that impact the ability to sustain systems, and the emergence of outcome-based contracting for system sustainment.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    There are other usages that are not particularly relevant to engineered systems, for example, sustainment and sustainability are used as a general programmatic/practice metric; “sustainability” is a term used to refer to what happens after initial implementation efforts (or funding ends) where sustainability measures the extent, nature, or impact of adaptations to the interventions or programs once implemented, e.g., in health care [9].

  2. 2.

    Another term for these systems is “mission critical”. These systems often become “legacy” systems because their field life is so long that during the majority of their life they are based on, or are composed of, out-of-date (old) processes, methodologies, technologies, parts, and/or application software.

  3. 3.

    The DoD’s military departments own and operate industrial facilities to maintain, repair, and overhaul equipment that are referred to as organic depots.

  4. 4.

    Sometimes this is referred to as “life-cycle sustainment planning” [34]. The purpose of life-cycle sustainment planning is to maximize readiness by delivering the best possible support outcomes at the lowest Operating and Support (O&S) cost. Programs that emphasize sustainment early in the system life cycle, deliver designs with the highest likelihood of achieving operational performance requirements, and reduced demand for sustainment.

  5. 5.

    The i/2 assumes that λ = 2 and the failures are uniformly distributed throughout the year.

  6. 6.

    Note, everything in this illustration is in miles rather than time. Mileage can be converted to time if desired, but it is not necessary to do so. We are also assuming that all maintenance is via component replacement, i.e., there is no component repair.

  7. 7.

    2.697 is the expected number of spares (per bus per year). If we want to know the corresponding confidence level, or conversely the number of spares needed to meet a given confidence level, we have to solve this problem using discrete-event simulation.

  8. 8.

    In this case, we assume that the preventative maintenance clock is reset to zero if the bus fails and has a corrective maintenance event prior to tp. This also assumes the component of interest starts each year good-as-new.

  9. 9.

    If the length (in miles) of the problem is increased, the two models will converge to the same cost.

  10. 10.

    For example, if an airline had a 24-h RUL prediction (assume there is no uncertainty in this prediction), they could reroute an aircraft to insure that it was at an airport that has the appropriate maintenance resources between midnight and 6 am tomorrow morning to obtain the required maintenance without interrupting any flight schedules.

  11. 11.

    There are several implicit assumptions in this analysis including that all charges for maintenance occur at the end of the year (end-of-year convention), that the $20,000 investment in PHM occurs at the beginning of year 1, and discrete annual compounding. In this case, the values of Cu and CPHM are both year 0 present values.

  12. 12.

    Also called life-of-need, life-of-type, or all-time buys. Alternatively, bridge buys mean purchasing enough parts to last until a planned design refresh point in the future where the part will be designed out.

  13. 13.

    There are Newsvendor solutions that include holding costs, however, the holding costs are $/part (no time involved), so these types of holding costs are not applicable to the lifetime buy problem.

  14. 14.

    For parts that have to be stored for many years in environmentally controlled inventory facilities, it is not unusual for the holding cost of the parts to be many times larger than the original cost to procure the parts.

  15. 15.

    As additive manufacturing technologies and processes mature, they will create an alternative path for the production of some low-volume components.

  16. 16.

    Note, some critical systems, i.e., approved national defense and energy programs may be covered by the Defense Production Act (DPA) and thereby can be given allocation priority. With respect to technology, the DPA was invoked by President Donald Trump for critical technology in the space industry [48] and more recently associated with ventilator manufacturing to combat the COVID-19 pandemic.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA

    Peter Sandborn & William Lucyshyn

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Correspondence to Peter Sandborn .

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  1. RAMS Consultants, Jaipur, Rajasthan, India

    Krishna B. Misra

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Sandborn, P., Lucyshyn, W. (2021). Sustainment Strategies for System Performance Enhancement. In: Misra, K.B. (eds) Handbook of Advanced Performability Engineering. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55732-4_12

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