A practical method for measuring product maintainability in a virtual environment

Abstract

Purpose

As an important product characteristic, maintainability is recognized as a highly significant factor in the economic success of engineering systems and products. Based on virtual reality technology, this paper aims to create an intuitive, immersive and interactive environment for product maintenance. In order to analyze and evaluate the product maintainability in a virtual maintenance environment, fuzzy comprehensive evaluation is used. At the early design stage, maintainability influencing factors are analyzed and the whole maintainability evaluation of the product is given by using fuzzy comprehensive evaluation method in virtual maintenance environment.

Design/methodology/approach

The paper provides a fuzzy comprehensive evaluation method for product maintainability evaluation in virtual environment.

Findings

Fuzzy comprehensive evaluation is used to evaluate product maintainability in virtual environment, and the application of virtual maintainability system is expanded.

Originality/value

According to maintainability requirement, the maintainability index set is built in this paper, and fuzzy comprehensive evaluation method is used to evaluate product maintainability in virtual maintenance environment at stage of early design.

Citation

Yu, H., Peng, G. and Liu, W. (2011), "A practical method for measuring product maintainability in a virtual environment", Assembly Automation, Vol. 31 No. 1, pp. 53-61. https://doi.org/10.1108/01445151111104173