Management of performance-based logistics contracts for defence procurement

Abstract

Acquisition of weapon systems is a challenging task since it involves capturing of the operational performance of weapon systems over several decades at the acquisition stage with limited data obtained during user trials. It is difficult to measure the operational performance metrics of complex weapon systems even in the presence of sufficient data due to its mathematical complexity. The operational effectiveness of a weapon system depends on design factors such as reliability, maintainability, supportability and the total cost of ownership. Developing mathematical models for predicting reliability, maintainability and supportability of a system involves modelling time-to-failure (TTF), time-to-maintain (TTM) and time-to-support (TTS) random variables and estimation of corresponding parameters of these random variables for all line replaceable units (LRUs) of the system. Depending on the complexity of the weapon system, the number of LRUs in the system can be as high as several hundreds. The user has to model TTF, TTM and TTS random variables of all the LRUs to accurately predict system reliability, maintainability and supportability.