Abstract
As an important quality characteristic, maintainability is the ability of a product to be repaired efficiently and economically. Because it is mainly determined at the design stage, maintainability is mostly affected by the construction of a product. Traditional product design methods put more focus on design for function and production, neglecting design for maintainability, which causes a gap between functional construction design and maintainability design. The delay of maintainability design results in huge costs for design changes and even irrevocable design flaws. Because of the weak relationship between functional construction and maintainability in product design, the influence of maintainability design on the product is limited. To resolve this problem, this paper proposes a design approach considering the relationship between maintainability and functional construction. First, maintainability design factors (MDFs) and functional construction design factors (FCDFs) are defined and classified. Second, based on topology graphic theory, a correlative relationship model is constructed by graphically combining the MDFs and FCDFs into a network diagram. Third, to determine primary design factors, a quantization matrix is developed to perform importance evaluation of the correlative relationship. Finally, a practical case is studied by implementing the proposed approach for the lubrication system of an armoured vehicle. The results validate the effectiveness and feasibility of the approach.
Highlights
The quality level determines to a great extent if a product can achieve performance continuously and effectively
The approach consists of three parts: Definition and classification of maintainability design factors (MDFs) and functional construction factors (FCDFs), modelling the relationship between MDFs and functional construction design factors (FCDFs), and importance evaluation of the relationship
The paper proposes a design approach based on correlative relationships between maintainability and functional construction
Summary
The quality level determines to a great extent if a product can achieve performance continuously and effectively. Repair time plan, maintenance strategy optimization and maintainability evaluation mainly concern more about later stage of product design. It results in the maintainability design lags to the product design. H Zhou et al put forward the view that the maintainability model is integrated into the design process[31] These methods proposed new insights that maintainability and product functional construction are parallel design. The main contributions of this paper is to propose a concurrent design method, which combines maintainability design and product functional construction design through considering the relationship between two types of design factors. To validate the proposed approach, it is applied to the practical case of the lubrication system of an armoured vehicle
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