In reliability, one is concerned with designing an item to last as long as possible without failure; in maintainability, the emphasis is on designing an item so that a failure can be corrected as quickly as possible. The combination of high reliability and high maintainability results in high system availability. Maintainability, then, is a measure of the ease and rapidity with which a system or equipment can be restored to operational status following a failure. It is a function of the equipment design and installation, personnel availability in the required skill levels, adequacy of maintenance procedures and test equipment, and the physical environment under which maintenance is performed. As with reliability, maintainability parameters are also probabilistic and are analyzed by the use of continuous and discrete random variables, probabilistic parameters, and statistical distributions. An example of a discrete maintainability parameter is the number of maintenance actions completed in some time t, whereas an example of a continuous maintainability parameter is the time to complete a maintenance action.

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