Enterprise Architecting to Advance Reliability and Maintainability Decision-Making

Abstract

Aircraft maintenance strategy, execution, and improvement decisions (i.e., solutions) are critical enterprise responses impacting a fleet's sustainment performance. Enterprise maintenance solutions are a key product support activity in the United States Department of Defense that must balance safety, economics, and operations. To guide and regulate enterprise reliability and maintainability decisions, several programs, policies, and standards govern various aspects of a system's product support and sustainment domain. While this body of enterprise knowledge prescribes what to do, it intentionally enables organizations to decide how they want to collaborate and organize to make enterprise-level reliability and maintainability decisions. In contrast, much of the academic literature focuses on how to make closed form organization-level reliability and maintainability decisions, but does not address the complexities and implications of involving multiple heterogeneous organizations.

To this end, this research seeks to develop enterprise architecture viewpoints and views to characterize the interdependencies, interactions, and integration of reliability and maintainability solutions across organizations. These architectures provide improved traceability and domain understanding of enterprise reliability and maintainability decisions to advance product support and sustainment outcomes. A notional United States Air Force commercial derivative aircraft serves as an exemplar of how these enterprise architectures identify enterprise actors and their exchanges to develop a reliability and maintainability decision-making framework. Together, this framework and its enterprise context guide the design of a decision support tool for enterprise reliability and maintainability solutions. Finally, applications of enterprise reliability and maintainability architectures are discussed to enable novel Digital Product Support strategies in the United States Department of Defense.