An Overview of Human Factors in Electronic Maintenance

Electronic equipment is becoming increasingly complex, and proper performance and high availability are becoming more crucial. A recent emphasis on improving maintenance planning and implementation is one method being used to assure meeting availability requirements. Human-factors contributions are essential to electronic-maintenance planning and implementation in all phases of equipment design and support. Much effort has been devoted to preparing guides for designing more maintainable equipment, but results have been little used. In the areas of equipment support, maintenance methods and procedures (both in general and for specific equipments) are being improved, but they still reflect too little knowledge of the maintenance man in the maintenance environment. Human-factors skills are being applied, with varying degrees of effectiveness, to the formulation of maintenance-manpower data, planning of support environment, installation, publications, and training. Trends, particularly those noted in manned space-travel programs, indicate that human-factors efforts in the area of electronic maintenance will improve and form a very valuable contribution to the over-all efforts to improve maintenance.