Obsolescence Management of Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) in Defence Systems

About 70 % of a system life-cycle cost is during the operations phase. Support activities, including maintenance, upgrades and repairs, are high cost items. In the past decade, performance-based contracting has become a standard agreement between the OEM and the customer that defines a fixed price for a guaranteed level of system performance over a given period of time. This puts the risks associated with support cost with the supplier. A means of cost reduction in the support phase is the use of Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COST) components. One of the issues with COTS however is obsolescence. The life of a COTS component is usually much shorter than the life of a defence system. This paper discusses a number of issues associated with the incorporation of COTS components in defence systems, their support and obsolescence management.