Repair times for systems that have high early failures

Abstract

Active repair time is that portion of down time during which the system is worked on to effect a repair. Repair time includes preparation time, diagnostic time, correction time and final checkout time. Systems such as airborne communications transceivers, switching circuits and radar‐missile units usually suffer an initial high rate of wear and failure. Improvement in this area requires actions to reduce the frequency of failure and to increase ease of repair. This paper advances the first passage time distribution of Brownian motion as a repairability model. The paper fits the model to observed active repair time of radar systems, obtaining as a result estimates of the mean first passage time, drift and diffusion parameters of the associated Brownian motion. Hypothesizing the first passage time distribution of Brownian motion for active repair time data of radar systems, the Kolmogorov‐Smirnov test shows that the model is accepted and can be chosen as the parent population.