EE523:

System Reliability & Maintainability

What do you want…???
Then…???
 Style…
A. Simple
Question in Tests
and Exams, But
NO amnesty!

B. Standard
Question in Tests
and Exams, But
with amnesty!

C. Hybrid:
Combination of A
and B
 Course Outline
 Introduction to Reliability
 Definitions, Why Reliability, Applications, Roles of Reliability
Engineer
 Basic Reliability Models
 System Reliability Modelling
 Electronic System Reliability
 Software Reliability
 Maintainability
 Availability
 Reliability Estimation and Applications
System Reliability…
RBDs…
Electronics System Reliability
Software Reliability
Fault Tree…
 Learning Objectives
At the end of this course, you should be able to:
 Know the definition of reliability and the factors associated
with it.
 Understand the concepts of Reliability, Availability and
Maintainability Engineering.
 Know the techniques for Reliability analysis.
 Calculate the failure rate under different conditions.
 Understand the failure and reliability curves as a factor of
time.
 Calculate RBDs Analytical System Reliability
 Understand Faults, Failure rate
 Understand the concepts of Software Reliability
 Reliability: Definition..
 Generally defined as the ability of a product to perform, as
expected, over certain time.
 Formally defined as the probability that an item, a product,
piece of equipment, or system will perform its intended
function for a stated period of time under specified
operating conditions.
 In the simplest sense, reliability means how long an item
(such as a machine) will perform its intended function
without a breakdown.

Reliability is performance over time, probability that

something will work when you want it to.
The Reliability definition has four important elements:

• Probability (A value between 0 and 1, number of times that an event

occurs (success) divided by total number trials)
e.g. probability of 0.91 means that 91 of 100 items will still be working at stated
time under stated conditions
• Performance (Some criteria to define when and how product fails, which
also describes what is considered to be satisfactory system operation)
e.g. amount of beam collisions, etc
• Time (system working until time (t), used to predict probability of an item
surviving without failure for a designated period of time)
• Operating conditions
These describe the operating conditions (environmental factors, humidity,
vibration, shock, temperature cycle, operational profile, etc.) that
correspond to the
stated product life.
Conflicts with real world...
There are "Real World" conflicts with this definition that we
need to keep in mind...
• Probability — Customers expect a probability of 1, "It Works"
• Intended Function — The product may be used in unintended ways and
still be expected to work
• Under Stated Conditions — The product may be operated outside of
the stated conditions and still be expected to work
• Prescribed Procedures — Customers may not have the required tools or
skill level and may not follow procedures and still expect the product to
work

Customers are looking for Quality over Time

 Why Reliability Engineering?
■ Reliability, Availability, Maintainability, Safety and Quality are
what the Customer says they are, not what the Engineers or the
Designers say they are.
■ Companies who control the Reliability of their products can only
survive in the business in future as today's consumer is more
“intelligent” and product aware.
■ Liability for unreliable products can be very high.
■ Complexity of products is ever increasing and thus challenge to
Reliability Engineering is also increasing.
■ Products are being advertised by their Reliability Ratings.
When Should Reliability Be Applied?
"From the cradle to the grave.
i.e. The entire life cycle of the product.

Product
Lifecycle
 Basic Reliability Terms…
perform its function at specified conditions when scheduled or is
not capable of performing functions to specification.
Failure Rate - The number of failures per unit of gross operating
period in terms of time, events, cycles.
MTBF - Mean Time Between Failures - The average time between
failure occurrences. The number of items and their operating
time divided by the total number of failures. For Repairable Items
MTTF - Mean Time To Failure - The average time to failure
occurrence. The number of items and their operating time
divided by the total number of failures. For Repairable Items and
Non-repairable Items
Hazard - The potential to cause harm. Harm including ill health and
injury, damage to property, plant, products or the environment,
production losses or increased liabilities.
Risk - The likelihood that a specified undesired event will occur
due to the realisation of a hazard by, or during work activities or
by the products and services created by work activities.
 Basic Reliability Terms…
operation, usually expressed as the probability that an item can
be retained in, or restored to, specified operable condition within
a specified interval of time when maintenance is performed in
accordance with prescribed procedures.
MTTR - Mean Time To Repair - The average time to restore the
item to specified conditions.
Maintenance Load - The repair time per operating time for an item.
Availability - A measure of the time that a system is actually
operating versus the time that the system was planned to
operate.
It is the probability that the system is operational at any random
time t.
Supportability - The ability of a service supplier to maintain the
Plant inbuilt reliability and to perform scheduled and unscheduled
maintenance according to the Plant inbuilt maintainability with
minimum costs.
Quality, Reliability and Safety
• Reliability can be considered as "Quality over time".
Customers frequently use the terms "quality" and
"reliability". We need to understand what they expect.

• Measurement of reliability is related to failure rates,

number of failures, warranty cost etc. Thus, reliability is
experienced by the customers when they use the product.

• Quality Level is measured in terms of defect levels (such as

ppm) when the product is received as new.

• Quality and reliability both can have significant impact on

Safety.
 Quality, Reliability and Safety
• Quality defects and failures both can adversely affect safety of
user, bystanders and equipment.
• Some quality defects can lead to unreliable and/or unsafe
product.
• Some examples of how unreliabily can affect safety:
- Failure of automobile steering system, brake system, axles etc, can result
in serious
accidents.
- Short circuit in electrical equipment can result in a shock or death.
- Failure of safety valve in a pressure cooker, leakage of regulator of an LPG
cylinder can result in an explosion.
- Poor reliability of a bridge can result in an accident and disaster
• However, all failures are not safety issues and all safety issues
are not due to failures.
 You…
As Reliability Engineering is concerned with analyzing failures and
providing feedback to design and production to prevent future
failures, it is only natural that a rigorous classification of failure
types must be agreed upon.
Reliability engineers usually speaks of:
Failures Causes
Failure Modes
Failure Mechanisms
• Reliability measurement is based on the failure rate

Failure
  rate =

• Some products (Non-repairable) are scrapped when they fail e.g. bulb
• Other products (Repairable) are repaired e.g. washing machine.
How Do Products Really Fail ?

• DESIGNED TO FAIL Two common types of

failures:
1. Sudden failure (no
• MANUFACTURED TO FAIL indicators): Stress
• ASSEMBLED TO FAIL exceeds strength ....
2. Degradation (gradual
• SCREENED TO FAIL wear out): degradation
indicator such as crack
• STORED TO FAIL growth, change of
• TRANSPORTED TO FAIL resistance, corrosion, .
This is ideal for
• OPERATED TO FAIL Condition-Based
Maintenance

Other failures may occur

because of human errors.
Bathtub Curve
 Bathtub Curve
A-B Early Failure / Infant mortality / Debugging / Break-in
• ’Teething' problems. Caused by design/material flaws
Eg: Joints, Welds, Contamination, Misuse, Misassembly

B-C Constant Failure / Useful life.

• Lower than initial failure rate and more or less constant until end of
life

C-D End of life failure / Wear out phase.

• Failure rate rises again due to components reaching end of life
Eg: Corrosion, Cracking, Wear, Friction, Fatigue, Erosion, Lack of PM
Bathtub Curve: Summary Table
Phase Failure Rate Possible Causes
Possible improvement
actions.
Burn-in Decreasing
(A-B) (DFR) Manufacturing defects, Better QC, Acceptance
welding, soldering, testing, Burn-in testing,
assembly errors, part screening, Highly
defects, poor QC, poor Accelerated Stress
workmanship, etc Screening, etc.
Useful Life Constant Excess Strength,
(B-C) (CFR) Environment, random redundancy, robust
loads, Human errors, design, etc
chance events, 'Acts of
God', etc
Wear-out Increasing Fatigue, Corrosion,
(C-D) (IFR) Aging, Friction, etc. Derating, preventive
maintenance, parts
replacement, better
material, improved
designs, technology,
etc.
 Managing Reliability 1

Reliability management is concerned with performance and

conformance over the expected life of the product
A systems approach to planning for, designing in, verifying,
tracking the reliability of products throughout their life to achieve
reliability goals.
• Reliability of a system is often specified by the failure rate A. □
• A = failures per time unit (in a collection of systems)
For most technical products (incl. embedded systems), A(t) is a
"bath-tub curve":
“Bathtub Curve”

Early Life Useful Life Wearout

 Maintainability

Maintainability is the measure of the ability of a system or

item to be retained or restored to a specified condition
when maintenance is performed by qualified personnel
using specified procedure and resources.
•  Maintainability can be measured with Mean Time To Repair
(MTTR), MTTR is average repair time and is given by

• MTBMA is Mean Time Between Maintenance Actions

including preventive and corrective maintenance tasks.
 Objectives of Maintainability

1. To influence design to achieve case of maintenance thus reducing

maintenance time & cost.

2. To estimate the downtime for maintenance which, when compared with

allowable downtime, determines whether redundancy is required to
provide acceptable continuity of a critical function.

3. To estimate system availability by combining maintainability data with

reliability data.

4. To estimate the man-hours and other resources required for performing

maintenance, which are useful for determining the costs of
maintenance and for maintenance planning.
 Advantages of Maintainability Prediction

1. It highlights areas of poor maintainability which require

product improvement, modification or change of design.

2. It permits user to make an early assessment of whether the

predicted downtime, the quality, quantity of personnel, tools
and test equipment are adequate and consistent with the
needs of system operational requirements.
 Availability

❖ A measure of the degree to which an item is in the operable and

committable state at the start of a mission, when the mission is
called for at an unknown time.

❖ Availability is thus defined as the probability that an item will be

available when required or as the proportion of total time that an
item is available for use.

The three common measures of availability are:

1. Inherent Availability (A,)

2. Achieved Availability (Aa)
3. Operational Availability (Ao)
Inherent
  Availability () 1

This is the ideal state for analyzing availability. The only considerations are
the MTBF and the MTTR. This measure does not take into account the
time for preventive maintenance and assumes repair begins
immediately upon failure of the system.

This can also be defined as steady - state availability.

The measure for inherent (potential) availability (AI) is :

  𝝁 MTB F
𝑨 𝑰= =
𝝀+ 𝝁 MTB F  +  MT TR

  Where: = Failure rate = 1/ MTBF

= Repair rate = 1/MTTR
 Achieved
  Availability ()

Achieved availability is somewhat more realistic in that it

takes preventive maintenance into account as well as corrective
maintenance. The assumption here is that, as in Ah there is no
loss of time waiting for the maintenance action to begin.

The measure for achieved (final) availability (AA) is:

  MTBMA
𝑨𝑨=
MTBMA  +  M M T

Where : MTBMA is the mean time between maintenance actions both

preventive and corrective.
MMT is the mean Maintenance Action Time, and MMT is further
decomposed into the effects of preventive and corrective maintenance.
  Operational Availability ()

This is what generally occurs in practice. Operational availability

takes into account that the maintenance response is not
instantaneous, repair parts may not be in stock as well as other
logistics issues.
The measure of operational (actual) availability A 0 is :

  MTBMA
𝑨𝟎 =
MTBMA  +  MDT

Where: MDT is mean down time.

References
 THANK YOU
SEE YOU NEXT WEEK