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Maintenance
Revised : 25 Jun 2023
Maintenance is predictive in nature. A good maintenance program is when maintenance are scheduled in advance and does not wait until something breaks.
In mars-sim, the inspection portion of maintenance is currently set to get started, say, a quarter of time, into its maintenance window.
Inspection means simply taking a close look at the system and parts and will not generate needed parts to be swapped out.
On the other hand, if a maintenance even does create needed parts, it is a preventative measure to avoid malfunction.
The concept of maintenance involves a few parameters such as Wear and Tear, health condition, time since last inspection/maintenance, number of inspections, etc.
Currently, the scope of both maintenance and malfunction modeling are found on the following 4 types of entities:
| Entity |
|---|
| Building |
| EVA suit |
| Robot* |
| Vehicle |
Note *: we do not have codes for modeling the repair of a bot yet.
Currently, the MalfunctionManager class handles the onset of malfunction as well as maintenance.
First of all, the wear from use over time plays into how likely an equipment may malfunction.
The simulation would track the amount of active use time for EVA suits, vehicles, and buildings and determines the amount of maintenance needed.
As settlers perform the task of MaintainBuilding and/or MaintainBuildingEVA on a building, the health condition of that building will be somewhat restored and the time (in # of sols) since last inspection will be reset back to zero.
For vehicles, settlers may similarly perform the task of MaintainEVAVehicle or MaintainGarageVehicle on a vehicle to improve/restore its health condition.
Usually, an engineer or technician will perform maintenance task on an entity that's due for a maintenance task.
If needed parts are involved, they will be pulled from the entity and may be retrofit (still in work in mars-sim) and put back to work.
Players should always pay close attention to see if there are any hiccups encountered in manufacturing parts and should not expect everything be handled automatically of the AI.
Needed parts will trigger a demand spike in 'GoodsManager'.
If needed parts run out in quantity, the demand will drive the settlement to start acquiring resources in order to produce these parts to replenish the inventory.
As we know, high demand drive up value points and the settlement will likely manufacture them in workshops or to trade them in from other nearby settlements.
As an alternative, players may also plan ahead to schedule the shipment needed parts from a resupply mission.
In future, it makes sense for settlers to salvage an entity for parts when it may be too worn out to be of much value.
We will probably need to model a new algorithm for salvaging an entity to go beyond how a part salvage is currently implemented as we do see that over time, there may be a lot of worn-out equipment, vehicles, or buildings that may have still carry resource value as materials could be recovered for building new ones.