The Maintenance Requirements System: Risk‐Based Resource Programming at Work

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe U.S. Navy has refined its Program Objective Memorandum (POM) development process to ensure that future budgets provide adequate ship maintenance funding while maintaining the proper balance between force structure and force readiness. The Maintenance Requirements System (MRS) is now the process which allows the U.S. Navy Surface Ship community to forecast and defend its requirements by articulating the potential mission impact (risk) of funding constraints.Risk is defined across many disciplines as the product of the severity of an outcome and the probability of an outcome. For maintenance, we define relative risk as the severity of system failure times the probability of system failure if a maintenance task is not performed.Any limited budget carries some risk, since some maintenance tasks will not be funded. When funding for a future availability is constrained, MRS sorts the representative maintenance tasks in descending order of risk and cuts the list based on funding. MRS then identifies the mission impact of each unfunded maintenance task. This method does not predict or dictate the actual maintenance performed on each ship in the future, but through feedback it projects the types and costs of required maintenance and provides an estimate of the impact of funding constraints.This paper outlines the basic principles of risk‐based decision making, provides a detailed discussion of an actual risk‐based decision making process (MRS), and suggests some other maintenance applications of risk‐based decision making.