Maintainability

The term maintainability of a technical product / system on the one hand includes the ability to keep the product at all repaired, on the other hand, the effort that has to be operated to the system so to maintain that its full functionality and availability of reserves.

According to DIN IEC 60300-3-10, maintainability is defined as follows:

"Ability of a unit, under given conditions of use, to be maintained or returned to a state in which it can fulfill a required function, whereby it is assumed that the maintenance is carried out under the given conditions with the prescribed procedures and tools. "

- DIN IEC 60300-3-10 (04/2004) Reliability Management - Part 3-10: Application Guide Maintainability (IEC 60300-3-10: 2001). Beuth Verlag, Berlin 2004 cited from

In other words, repairability describes how quickly (time as a quantitative variable) and how easily (qualitative variables) a malfunction can be remedied, using the previously defined procedures and tools to remedy the problem. Customers prefer products that are easy to repair because that saves costs and downtime. Maintainability has a significant impact on life cycle costs (i.e. the costs a product incurs over its entire life cycle).

Maintainability can be supported by various measures, including

• the use of standardized components to reduce the storage of spare parts or to simplify the procurement channels,
• the easy accessibility of the parts that have to be repaired or replaced more often,
• the ease of use and detachability of units as well
• the simple and precise testability that determines the fault.

Machines that are characterized, for example, by the fact that they fail spontaneously for no diagnosable reason, cannot be maintained because they can only be repaired after a failure .

Reasons for low or poor maintainability can be:

• Necessity of complex analyzes for error detection,
• poor accessibility (e.g. in a spacecraft),
• The need for frequent and / or time-consuming maintenance work,
• high level of difficulty of the work required,
• high costs or long delivery times for spare parts.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ hubertbecker-online: Logistik- An overview: upkeep and maintainability ( memento of the original from March 4, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.