Hello, Fort Nelson, BC

Couple of things to report. One, the simulations of maintenance logistics I worked on with RTR Technologies, while working on and with the Aircraft Maintenance Model, incorporated a number of concepts. Many of these were defined in the NAMP (Naval Aviation Maintenance Program). Among the events considered, both implicitly and explicitly, are these:

• Time between failure of parts
• Availability of personnel, tools, and facilities to perform maintenance
• Scheduled and Unscheduled Services
• Availability of parts in local supply
• Time of delivery for parts not in local supply
• Time to begin work on repair (after other items in queues are addressed and sufficient personnel are available.
• Chance that correct part is not delivered
• Time between failure of ad hoc repair not using correct parts

There are a few additional factors in play as well, but I report these because they have become annoyingly germane in my life over the last couple of days. Nothing evil, dangerous, or particularly expensive, just annoying. Tomorrow I will execute a new set of dice rolls for a new iteration of the Monte Carlo simulation that is the automotive portion of my life, and we shall see what happens. With luck I won’t have to mention any of this again. If you need to know what this is about, check yesterday’s post–and then check a map. Then consider the human costs of things we blithely attempt to simulate using computers.

In the meantime I reworked the way that my JavaScript code handles default parameters, so the animations work correctly on a wider variety of platforms, including my iPhone.

I had experimented with statements that did the same thing in different ways, but the interpreters balked. This method is both cleaner and doesn’t cause the interpreter to puke.