Both military and commercial asset management practices are receiving renewed scrutiny to reduce the logistic cost of ownership. Asset managers are being asked to analyse and improve on maintenance practices. This paper describes the application of computer modelling techniques to evaluate the effectiveness of existing and alternate maintenance solutions. Modelling using computer simulations is widely applied to new system development and allows complex processes and structures to be analysed and quantitatively evaluated. However, less work has been undertaken in applying modelling techniques to analyse existing in-service maintenance systems performance against potential alternatives.Specific characteristics of a stochastic model for complex military platforms have been identified to assure that model implementation accurately represents suggested maintenance processes. Systems Engineering methodology is used to create and analyse targeted maintenance models in question: reactive and proactive variants. Existing maintenance process has been described and performance measurement criteria have been identified. In conclusion the models' effectiveness has been evaluated and complemented by its sensitivity analysis. The objective is to present the case study of maintenance modelling applied for the complex military platform.
An important modeling shortfall in current virtual environments developed for space applications is the absence of space weather conditions even though these conditions can drastically affect the conduct of space operations. One of the most prominent of these weather conditions is the distortion of the Earth's magnetosphere and the resulting change in electron density charge due to the solar wind. The absence of space weather in virtual environments will become more of an issue as the US Air Force and nations around the world increase their activities in space. To address a portion of this capability shortfall, our work extended the capabilities of the Virtual SpacePlane by modeling electron density levels in the near-Earth space environment and providing a visualization capability. Knowledge about the locations in the near-Earth space environment where the areas of critical electron density are located assists the spaceplane crewmember in planning missions that minimize the risk of electrical charge accumulation within the SpacePlane. Knowledge about the areas of high electron density is important because when space operations take place in low earth orbits, free electrons present in the space environment can collect on the surface of the space vehicle. The accumulation of free electrons can result in significant but uneven surface charging that can result in a potential difference, which can result in a static discharge. Electrical charge accumulation and discharge is a crew safety hazard since it often leads to electrical arcing and equipment damage. The severity of the damage depends upon the strength of the discharge and the spacecraft systems involved in the discharge event. Damage to the spacecraft can include spurious electronic switching activity, vehicle thermal material breakdown, amplifier and solar cell degradation, optical sensor degradation, and physical damage to the space vehicle's structure. The visualization capability we developed provides a rendering of the shell around the Earth that indicates where the electron density exceeds a critical value that could result in a dangerous static charge buildup. We used the Parameterized Ionospheric Model (PIM) model to calculate electron density.In this paper we briefly describe the VSP project, describe the requirements, goals and objectives of our project, and discuss the design and implementation of the space weather capability. We also describe the changes that we made to the user interface and VSP software architecture to accommodate the space weather capability. The paper concludes with a presentation of our results and suggestions for future work.
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