A practical method for measuring product maintainability in a virtual environment

Abstract

PurposeAs an important product characteristic, maintainability is recognized as a highly significant factor in the economic success of engineering systems and products. Based on virtual reality technology, this paper aims to create an intuitive, immersive and interactive environment for product maintenance. In order to analyze and evaluate the product maintainability in a virtual maintenance environment, fuzzy comprehensive evaluation is used. At the early design stage, maintainability influencing factors are analyzed and the whole maintainability evaluation of the product is given by using fuzzy comprehensive evaluation method in virtual maintenance environment.Design/methodology/approachThe paper provides a fuzzy comprehensive evaluation method for product maintainability evaluation in virtual environment.FindingsFuzzy comprehensive evaluation is used to evaluate product maintainability in virtual environment, and the application of virtual maintainability system is expanded.Originality/valueAccording to maintainability requirement, the maintainability index set is built in this paper, and fuzzy comprehensive evaluation method is used to evaluate product maintainability in virtual maintenance environment at stage of early design.

Maintainability fuzzy evaluation based on maintenance task virtual simulation for aircraft system

“…AHP method [18,23] is used to determine weights of the eight maintainability attributes, which are shown in Fig. 6.…”

“…Yu et al provided a fuzzy comprehensive evaluation method for product maintainability evaluation in virtual environment as well. In their research, fuzzy comprehensive evaluation method is used to evaluate product maintainability in virtual maintenance environment at stage of early design [23].…”

Maintenance Process Simulation Based Maintainability Evaluation by Using Stochastic Colored Petri Net

“…Peng et al [5] designed a desktop virtual reality-based system for maintainability design and verification, a case-based reasoning method combined with the extensible markup language are applied in the maintainability verification of the system. Yu et al [6] also applied a fuzzy comprehensive evaluation in the maintainability evaluation based on the virtual environment, and the methods can be applied along with a maintenance task virtual demonstration. Zhou et al [7] also studied the effects of ergonomics and human factors in maintenance space evaluation, and human factors are considered as an attribute in maintainability.…”

“…The first is the time related methods based on the probability theory [1][2][3], the maintenance time is the only index considered in these methods. The second is the process based method [4][5][6][7], the maintenance process is modeled to support task demonstration in these methods. The last is the multiple attribute decision based method [8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19], different kinds of attributes are considered and maintainability deficiencies can be discovered with these methods.…”

Maintenance Time Measurement for Mechanical Products Based on Virtual Prototype

“…On the other hand, with the development of virtual reality technology, the application of virtual prototype-related technologies and methods has gradually become a research hotspot [7] in the design and R&D of products. The literatures [8][9][10] developed virtual maintenance training systems, but couldn't obtain maintenance time indicators. Literatures [11][12][13][14][15] studied the maintenance time prediction methods based on virtual maintenance, but lacked reasonable classification of maintenance motions, and the accuracy of time measurement was affected.…”