Demystifying ship operational availability: an innovative approach for management of in-service support contracts

Abstract

Asset availability optimisation concepts have been studied in a multitude of industries for a few decades now. The defence industry is no exception, whilst traditionally navies worldwide were concerned in achieving targeted ship availability, nowadays budget and regulatory restrictions increase the burden for all stakeholders. Most concepts developed are applied to systems that do not have many interlinked and parallel operating sub-systems. Nevertheless, navy ships are complex assets and it appears no generic framework has yet been developed that is universally applicable. A key drawback is that historically, proposed efforts remained placed on complex mathematical calculations and estimates, which required not only sophisticated programmes but also limited the understanding to a few highly skilled professionals able to implement them. This has never been appealing to most practitioners as well as the majority of stakeholders who continuously complain about the gap between theory and practice. This paper proposes an innovative 4-step approach by demystifying ship operational availability involving both human and machinery/systems related factors. These factors called downtime influence factors (DIFs) are presented in a simplified 'bitesize' form for better understanding of the practitioners to enable them to appreciate their individual contribution towards improving the common goal achieving higher Ship Operational Availability.