Maintenance Process Simulation Based Maintainability Evaluation by Using Stochastic Colored Petri Net

Abstract

Maintainability is a critical design characteristic of products. Maintainability evaluation plays an important role in maintainability design. Existing maintainability evaluation approaches neglect logistic effects on system maintainability. In this paper, tuples of stochastic colored petri nets (SCPN) are used to express the constituents of a maintenance process; and the maintenance process model is developed based on the SCPN. Approaches for calculating the required maintenance resources are proposed according to the state equation of the SCPN, and a method for calculating maintenance time is proposed by using an SCPN based discrete-event simulation. Finally, the line maintenance of a wheel steering system is used as a case study to illustrate the application and effectiveness of our proposed approaches. The work discussed herein provides a maintainability evaluation methodology based on the maintenance task demonstration that is conducted on the digital mockup of products. The approaches can be applied in the design stage when there are no physical mockups, and the maintainability design can be carried on concurrently with the development of products.