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To ensure the safety of the astronauts and the prolongation of the life of the space station, maintainability design and verification is an integral part of design process. As a crucial factor in maintainability design, visibility evaluation is the most important part of maintainability design and verification. However, completely different ergonomics parameters and lacking of relevant research are the two major problems limiting the development and application of the visibility design in the microgravity environment. This paper proposes a visibility automation analysis and evaluation model in microgravity environment based on virtual maintenance. Firstly, visibility evaluation indicators are determined by the literature research and the astronauts working condition investigations. Secondly, in responds to the indicators, this paper proposes an evaluation method combining ergonomics and maintainability criteria based on microgravity. Moreover, a comprehensive visual accessibility evaluation model in microgravity environment is developed. Finally, a case of ORU disassembly in space station is conducted and verifies the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Modern society has a high demand for manufactured products in almost all fields. To achieve high availability and reduce costs, products require good maintainability, which is an intrinsic property that is decided mostly in the design and manufacturing stages. Design evaluation plays an important role in improving the maintainability of products. At present, though designers can verify maintainability by conducting virtual maintenance simulations on digital mockups (DMUs) to test design and manufacturing effects, this approach requires substantial time and specialist knowledge. In this paper, a hybrid maintainability evaluation method based on virtual reality (VR) and fuzzy comprehensive evaluation (FCE) is proposed to solve the problem. First, an evaluation index system is established to launch the design requirements. A VR-based method is proposed to help conduct the immersive maintenance simulation in a virtual environment. A maintenance simulation monitoring platform is developed to help designers evaluate maintainability and make decisions. Finally, FCE is leveraged to give a comprehensive evaluation result for maintainability status. A case of comparative experiments was conducted to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method. The participants of two groups were encouraged to evaluate the maintainability of a fluid physical experiment rack for a space station based on a traditional method and the proposed method. After the physical verification and result analysis, the proposed method was demonstrated to have better abilities to help predict design flaw and make design decision.