Multi-Attribute Reliability and Maintainability Engineering Assessment Methodology

While current Air Force logistics processes have served us well, and provided unparalleled support since the end of the Cold War, the need to significantly reduce costs while improving weapons system availability is essential. Senior Air Force officials have stated in numerous documents that the Air Force has reached a point where its current way of doing supply chain management (SCM) business, and the systems that support the current process, are limited in their ability to significantly improve readiness beyond the current levels. Cognition LLC proposes to research and develop a methodology to aid the AF engineer in defining requirements, assigning functions, establishing priorities, and executing engineering decisions to aid in the support of reliability, maintainability, and supportability factors in relevant AF supply chains. The goal is to increase the productivity, capability, and technical effectiveness of AF system engineers to support legacy aircraft supply chain functions by leading the engineer through the complex activities of multiple-attribute tradeoffs necessary to achieve improved product performance and availability. The Cognition LLC approach will aid the AF in not only migrating improved System Engineering methodologies into the sustainment process but also implementing tool sets to parse complex availability and performance factors necessary to achieve continued product improvement. The Cognition LLC developed methodology will assess critical performance attributes (to include requirements, functions, and priorities) and availability attributes (to include reliability, maintainability, supportability, and producibility) to guide the systems engineer to improved functional performance. The methodology will map and define the relationships between performance and availability attributes and help cultivate enhanced technical understanding that will lead to continued product improvement. This effort will also inform refinements to AFMC’s Sustainment Business Process Model (SBPM). BENEFIT: Our goal is to develop and deliver a comprehensive systems engineering methodology that gives the sustainment community a set of advanced algorithms to optimize performance and availability using requirements, functions, priorities, reliability, maintainability, supportability and producibility as inputs. Our solution will provide a methodology to parse complex availability and performance attributes to support complex systems engineering and achieve measurable technical effectiveness. Through the innovative integration of artificial intelligence and emerging technology, our designed capability will map and define the relationships between performance and availability attributes and help cultivate enhanced technical understanding that will lead to continued product improvement.. During Phase II, Cognition LLC will develop a methodology with facilitating algorithms to establish a standardized multi-attribute engineering assessment capability with outstanding commercialization potential.