Maintainability and safety indicators at design stage for mechanical products

With the industrial products competition, reliability, maintainability and safety are key characteristics for availability improvement. This is mainly true in industries like automotive, aeronautic, or NC machines tools. Therefore, it is crucial to predict these characteristics as soon as possible before the manufacturing starts. This paper presents an approach to provide indicators for maintainability and safety prediction at early stage of design. The assessment procedure uses the product CAD 3D model and an associated semantic matrix gathering information on the product components criticality and reliability. Using this information we calculate indicators for the product maintainability and safety. An academic application is developed to illustrate our approach and point out the interaction between maintainability and safety constraints to determine suitable solution. In conclusion, we state on possible extensions of this approach for evaluating other product lifecycle characteristics and we give guidelines on the implementation aspects. # 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.