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

6Design for Reliability

6.1 WHAT TO EXPECT FROM THIS CHAPTER

Now that we have a good grasp of reliability requirements and some quantitative modeling supporting them, we turn to the question of how to arrange a design so that reliability requirements can be met. The development team needs to take deliberate actions to build reliability into the product or service. Without this attention, the product or service will have some reliability, but it will be just whatever you get by chance. You need to take control of system reliability and take positive steps to drive it in the direction you want, as summarized in the reliability requirements. This chapter discusses several techniques that you can use to build reliability into the product or service, an activity we call “design for reliability.” These include:

• a thorough understanding of the reasoning process underpinning design for reliability,
• a CAD tool for design for reliability in printed wiring boards (PWBs),
• fault tree analysis (FTA),
• failure modes, effects, (and criticality) analysis,
• a brief introduction to design for reliability in software, covered in more detail in Chapter 9, and
• robust design as a reliability enhancement tool.

As with many of the ideas in this book, none of these receives an exhaustive treatment because they are each treated thoroughly elsewhere (references provided) as individual technologies in their own right. The primary intent here is to show how these apply in reliability engineering specifically ...