《《PS2》》.pdf

Combat System Maintenance Status David H. Olwell Introduction and setting Army forces depend upon combat systems to move and fight. Because Army forces move in very stressful environments, these combat systems eventually break and require repair. While a system is awaiting repair, it is considered non- mission capable or NMC. The percentage of vehicles awaiting repair is one of the key indicators of a unit’s ability to fight, and is tracked at all levels of command. The operational readiness rate, or OR Rate, is the percentage of systems in a given class which are Mission Capable (MC). In this paper, we will discuss three simple models which describe the OR rate for the number of tanks in a tank battalion in the 1st Armored Division. We will also discuss ways the models could be extended to improve their usefulness to the commander. We assume that the reader is familiar with elementary matrix algebra, linear systems of difference equations, and optimization using differential calculus. Markov Chain models We begin with a simple model where a tank can be in one of two states: mission capable (MC) or non-mission capable (NMC). Each day, on average a certain percentage of the mission capable tanks break, and move to the other state. Each day, a certain percentage of the NMC tanks are repaired and become operational. Graphically, we have: 169 Figure 1 We use the notation that p is the probability that a tank stays MC ; 1-p is the 1 1 probability that a tank moves from MC to NMC; p is t