Publisher's Synopsis
Complex modern electronic and electro-mechanical systems have a huge number of critical failure modes, all of which must be addressed ideally at the design and concept stage, with the objective being to achieve a high level of Operational Availability . Usually these issues have to be addressed with finite resources. It is essential to carry out a formal reliability modeling exercise at the concept and development stages of any complex system. At the stage of development, reliability engineers must inevitably rely on estimated failure rates and logistics delays based on assumptions of the proposed repair and support organization, in order to try to define the number and type of spare parts to be held forward. All of this has an impact on funding for the project taking into account such factors as redundancy, the initial spares buy and repair manpower requirements. To achieve a high state of readiness or system availability requires that every element has been considered and estimated and that things like the initial spares provisioning, the repair organization, manpower levels and levels of training and test equipment are all adequate for the task. Even with all of the combined resources of design and reliability engineers, logistic planning staff and human resources specialists brought to bear on the task of estimating the need for support equipment, maintenance schedules, repair process definitions and required manpower levels, we are still left with the task of assessing every possible reason for system downtime. Only when these problems are addressed can we begin to put the essential elements in place to ensure that we have an adequate level of Operational Availability
