Quantitative Determination of Maintenance Concepts for COTS Based Systems

A system´s maintenance concept determination prior to fielding involves analysis of the supportability characteristics of the design, and knowledge of the User needs and User requirements. In performing a repair level analysis on an open system, there is a misperception that COTS equipment has a predetermined maintenance concept and therefore does not need to be modeled. The maintenance concept is for the system itself, and the whole system needs to be modeled and optimized to determine the repair level best suited for the subsystems and their associated COTS equipment.