Maintainability Requirements and Design Criteria

This chapter focuses on maintainability requirements and design criteria. It is meant only to serve as a brief overview of the systems engineering process. The maintainability requirements must be defined to ensure that the system will meet not only the functional needs, but also any supply chain and cost requirements. The purpose of maintainability engineering is to develop a product or system that can be easily maintained to ensure its continued cost‐effective use, and maximum availability for the customer. Design guidelines are often used to perform tradeoffs among the various design alternatives (i.e., maintainability, performance, reliability, safety, etc.). Checklists are another tool the maintainability engineer can use. In summary, the checklist is a valuable tool that can be used for many purposes, but checklists must be used cautiously and must not be relied upon as the only tool.