Analysis of maintenance records to support prediction of maintenance requirements in the German Army

Abstract : Today the German armed forces are faced with a broad, varied and graduated range of tasks including missions outside Germany. A major challenge in planning the force structure for missions like the one in Kosovo is to predict the required maintenance capacities. This thesis conducts an exploratory data analysis of maintenance records of the German Army, using the wheeled reconnaissance tank "Luchs" as an example. The question under investigation is whether or not data from the maintenance records can be used to support a future "maintenance prediction tool," It is shown that repairtime distributions extracted from the data can be used to model the repair process in a simulation. The Weibull distribution family, which is commonly used in reliability applications, proved flexible enough to simulate repairtimes and workorder supply times. Implementing these results in a simulation of the repair process will improve the accuracy and quality of the simulation output. In addition, this thesis discusses data quality issues and makes design suggestions for a new maintenance organization software. Data problems can be minimized if the problems identified in this study are aggressively attacked during the design and implementation phases of the new software.