THE MAINTENANCE REQUIREMENTS SYSTEM - RISK-BASED RESOURCE PROGRAMMINGAT WORK

The U.S. Navy has refined its Program Objective Memorandum (POM) devel opment process to ensure that future budgets provide adequate ship mai ntenance funding while maintaining the proper balance between force st ructure and force readiness. The Maintenance Requirements System (MRS) is now the process which allows the U.S. Navy Surface Ship community to forecast and defend its requirements by articulating the potential mission impact (risk) of funding constraints. Risk is defined across m any disciplines as the product of the severity of an outcome and the p robability of an outcome. For maintenance, we define relative risk as the severity of system failure times the probability of system failure if a maintenance task is not performed. Any limited budget carries so me risk, since some maintenance tasks will not be funded. When funding for a future availability is constrained, MRS sorts the representativ e maintenance tasks in descending order of risk and cuts the list base d on funding. MRS then identifies the mission impact of each unfunded maintenance task. This method does not predict or dictate the actual m aintenance performed on each ship in the future, but through feedback it projects the types and costs of required maintenance and provides a n estimate of the impact of funding constraints. This paper outlines t he basic principles of risk-based decision making, provides a detailed discussion of an actual risk-based decision making process (MRS), and suggests some other maintenance applications of risk-based decision m aking.