Integrated Discrete-Event Simulation Environment for Analysis of Rotorcraft Reliability, Availability, and Maintainability

Operations and support cost constitutes nearly 70% of rotorcraft lifecycle cost. When considering new rotorcraft concepts and technology infusion for current concepts, quantitative performance evaluation is undertaken during conceptual design. However, the effect of design decisions on operations and support metrics are typically evaluated qualitatively. Since operation and support costs constitute an overwhelming majority of rotorcraft lifecycle cost, quantitative evaluation of these metrics is required to fully capture the design trade space. To this end, an integrated discrete-event simulation environment is developed to quantify the impact of architectural decisions and subsystem technology infusion on key metrics including the operational availability, system mean time between failures, Maintenance Free Operating Period, repair cost, and maintenance man-hours needed for a given period of operation. Since data needs are immense, it is appropriate to use data from existing platforms to populate unknown fields. An example is presented in this paper for a notional helicopter to demonstrate the use of the discrete-event simulation environment as a tradeoff environment for operations and supportability metrics.