A method for the maintainability evaluation at design stage using maintainability design attributes

Abstract

Maintainability is one of the design characteristics of a system, which has a great influence on maintenance cost and difficulty in the application stage. It is better that the maintainability evaluation work is carried out simultaneously with the system design process. Consequently, the maintainability assessment method has become a research focus recently. The objective of this paper is to describe a procedure to evaluate maintainability of a system at the design stage, the results of which can support concurrent decision-making with specified maintenance requirements and the guidance of maintainability design improvement.With this purpose, some maintainability comprehensive indicators are defined based on the maintainability design attributes to evaluate the system maintainability. A brief literature review is first presented, including the exposition of main concepts and maintainability evaluation ideas. Then, nine maintainability design attributes that should be taken into account during maintainability indicator evaluation are analyzed, including classification and quantitative measurement of these maintainability design attributes. Based on evaluation values of maintainability design attributes, several maintainability indicators are obtained through the maintainability evaluation process. Finally, a case is studied to demonstrate how the proposed evaluation method can be applied to a practical scenario.