Modeling the Contribution of Maintenance Manpower to Readiness and Sustainability

This report describes and simulates a simple queuing model relating the mix of maintenance personnel in a repair station to weapon system availability in dynamic, wartime scenarios. The mixes of manpower considered in the model are described by the number of personnel in each occupation, their skill levels, and their cross-training. The model demonstrates the feasibility and importance of modeling a rich mix of manpower while explicitly considering the uncertainties about the true wartime demands for skills. Its most important output is the expected number of weapons systems unavailable due to missing reparable parts by day of the war. Three simulations demonstrate the importance of focusing on measures directly related to generating wartime sorties. They also demonstrate that uncertainty about the true wartime demands for resources makes it important to evaluate the contributions of each resource mix in a range of possible scenarios.