ATE obsolescence solutions; costs and benefits [military equipment]

Test equipment obsolescence is a serious problem in DoD automated test equipment (ATE) systems today. Test instruments are routinely integrated into ATE that are used by the services at all maintenance levels from flight lines for routine maintenance to depots for major overhauls and factories for production and acceptance testing. Often ATE systems are required to operate for years, sometimes decades. In many systems, the instruments are now reaching end-of-life and are failing at increased rates. Exacerbating this problem, critical components necessary to repair the original instruments are often out of production, rendering the instrument obsolete and unsupportable. As a result of these factors, many complex ATE instruments have become, or are destined to become the problem-prone "system degraders" tracked in ATE program reviews. This paper presents data on the magnitude of obsolescence challenges facing the DoD, an overview of the costs and benefits of current approaches used to solve the problem in comparison to the composite replacement instrument approach.