Masters thesis — Royal Australian Navy), Naval Postgraduate School, 2015. Full text: https://archive.org/details/DTIC_ADA632239
A work-week policy that looks fine on a spreadsheet and fails at the maintenance line is how a navy discovers fatigue in the field instead of on paper — the thesis is an argument that crew-endurance models must be validated against operations, not against each other.
Simulating a 21-member Armidale-class patrol boat crew in the Navy Management Diary over three weeks, the proposed RAN Navy Standard Work Week model breaks down in practice — the maintenance category most often exceeded its allocated hours, which the thesis says may warrant platform- and occupation-specific customization; and the NMD's fatigue tool versus the SAFTE model (FAST software) produced statistically significant differences in predicted risk, so the methodology should be replicated on a larger sample with real operational performance observations before comparing the two.
Why it matters
A work-week policy that looks fine on a spreadsheet and fails at the maintenance line is how a navy discovers fatigue in the field instead of on paper — the thesis is an argument that crew-endurance models must be validated against operations, not against each other.
Use when: When two validated-looking models disagree significantly, the answer isn't to pick one — it's to test both against reality.
