Front End Analysis as a Reliability Tool in Today’s Commercial Off the Shelf Environment

In today’s market place a trend is in place to move from MIL- STANDARD (MIL-STD) to Commercial off the Shelf (COTS) equipment as cost becomes a major driver in our military procurements. While it may have been sufficient in the past to focus on extensive classical reliability and maintainability testing methods of complex models as the primary method for ensuring the procurements had a high degree of reliability these methods today in the in procurement of COTS equipment is receiving push back from many of the COTS vendors.