Integration of reliability and tolerance effect analysis

Abstract

The authors focus on the development of systems with online optimized reliability. They argue that in the case of online analysis, reliability analysis should have the same importance as functional analysis currently has, and that reliability should be integrated in a design. Further the function of a quality assurance team is only to check this built-in reliability, not to make a functional correct design also reliable. Therefore the designer (or design team) should be able to perform reliability analysis during the system synthesis. Although conventional failure rate prediction using, for example MIL-HDBK-217 methods, has proven to be very useful, there are often considerable numbers of failures due to unexpected causes. Analysis of these failures shows that a considerable group of these unexpected failures is due to a combination of tolerance effects and part (over-) stress. A method is described to predict these failures.<>