Title: Regeneration engineering for improving technical asset life cycle: an application to weapon systems availability assessment

Authors: Maxime Monnin; Benoit Iung; Olivier Senechal

Addresses: PREDICT 19, Avenue de la Forêt de Haye, CS 10508, 54519 Vandoeuvre-Lès-Nancy, France. ' Centre de Recherche en Automatique de Nancy (CRAN), CNRS – UMR7039 – Université Henri Poincaré – Nancy I – INPL, Faculté des Sciences BP239, 54506 Vandoeuvre, France. ' Laboratoire d'automatique et de, mécanique industrielles et humaines (LAMIH), CNRS: UMR8530 – Université de Valenciennes et du Hainaut-Cambresis, Le Mont Houy, 59313 Valenciennes cedex 9, France

Abstract: Today, system availability is a determining factor in system deployment because it must be guaranteed in the operational phase while taking a large part of assets whole life cycle cost (WLCC). Thus, controlling system availability is now a critical issue in systems engineering. This is even more true for military systems that operate in a battle context. In fact, since they must act in a hostile environment, they can become unavailable due to system failures or damage. In both cases, it is necessary to regenerate the system in order to restore its availability in mission. In this paper, we propose a weapon system modelling method that supports regeneration engineering. This method relies on a unified failure/damage approach to extend accepted availability models. It integrates both failures and damage, as well as the possibility of regeneration, into the operational availability assessment. The proposed method is illustrated with an example of weapons system architecture.

Keywords: weapons system of systems; technical assets; system modelling; weapon systems availability; reliability; survivability; vulnerability; regeneration engineering; technical asset life cycles; asset whole life cycle cost; systems engineering; military systems; battle context; asset management.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSEAM.2012.044989

International Journal of Strategic Engineering Asset Management, 2012 Vol.1 No.1, pp.69 - 90

Published online: 23 Aug 2014 *

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