A SPAR Modelling Platform Case Study: Skynet 5

This paper documents a case study into the Availability, Reliability and Maintainability (AR&M) modelling activity undertaken for the Skynet 5 Beyond Line Of Sight (BLOS) service programme between January 2006 and July 2011. The AR&M modelling activity was completed using the Monte Carlo simulation tool SPAR, produced by Clockwork Solutions. SPAR is a flexible software tool which allowed the development of models to include the end-to-end Skynet 5 system, its complex logistic support network, and the calculation of bespoke Service availability metrics. The development of this end-to-end type approach has provided a number of benefits, including: highlighting potential areas of weakness in the support solution; understanding the impact on global AR&M performance; and validation of consolidated spares recommendations and identification of areas with insufficient spares, at multiple levels of support (as many as the user requires). Furthermore it has the ability to demonstrate the impact of management system downtime; which would not directly impact the availability of the system, but may delay the identification (and hence repair time) of a co-incident failure.