A Field Study on Concurrent Spare Parts Recommendation in an Airborne Weapon System

Abstract

As the complexity of weapon systems has grown exponentially during the past few years, initial operation capability has been a crucial factor for military forces. Concurrent spare parts (CSPs) is the quantity of spare parts ensuring initial operating period specified by demanding forces acquiring newly deployed weapon systems. Because of the growth of system complexity, recommending precise CSP is not trivial. The Republic of Korea developed an improved CSP recommendation system and deployed the system for naval weapon systems. In this paper, we increase the prediction accuracy of CSP up to 23.1 per cent and 7.16 per cent higher in terms of budget constraint and operational availability (Ao) constraint. The main improvement is achieved by facilitating simulations using the real field data from Korean air force. Also, we propose two validation approaches and show the possibility of extension to the general weapon systems. From the experimental study, we show that the CSP recommendation system can be deployed for navy and air forces.