Reliability, Maintainability, and Supportability: Best Practices for Systems Engineers

3Reliability Modeling for Systems Engineers: Nonmaintained Systems

3.1 WHAT TO EXPECT FROM THIS CHAPTER

It is not the purpose of this book to support your becoming a reliability engineering specialist. As a systems engineer, though, you will be interacting with these specialists both as a supplier and as a customer. You will be supplying reliability requirements that specialist engineers will use to guide their design for reliability work. You will be a customer for information flowing back from reliability engineering specialists regarding how well a design, in its current state, is likely to meet those reliability requirements and whether deployed systems are meeting their reliability requirements. The purpose of this chapter, then, is primarily to support your supplier and customer roles in these interactions. You will need enough facility with the language and concepts of reliability engineering that you will create sensible reliability requirements. Much of this was covered in Chapter 2, and the material covered in this chapter supports and amplifies the concepts introduced there. You will also need enough of this facility to be able to sensibly use the information provided by specialist reliability engineers so that design may be properly guided.

The material in this chapter is designed to support this latter need. What you will find here is chosen so that it reinforces correct use of the concepts and language of reliability modeling for nonmaintained systems.¹ It is complete ...