Introduction to Reliability, Maintainability & Availability

A solid foundation for Project Managers & Systems Engineers

Created by: Christopher Olson
Systems Engineer, Adj Professor, CSEP, PMP

What Will I Learn?

• What a failure is and why documenting the definition is important
• How complexity in a system decreases its reliability
• What the different failure data distributions are and how they apply to system reliability
• Failure Probability Density Function (PCF) and Cumulative Density Function (CDF) curves
• The mean, median and mode of failure data distributions
• The difference between Failure Rate λ(t) and Hazard Rate h(t)
• The concept of the bathtub curve and its limitations
• Reliability networks, types, and applications
• FMEA and an FMECA, their relationships, and their application to system design concepts
• The difference between Maintainability and Maintenance
• Why the Operational Concept mission scenario are important to RM&A
• The different maintenance levels and maintenance types
• Metrics used to measure maintainability
• Reliability-Centered Maintenance (RCM) is and its relationship to Condition-Based Maintenance (CBM)
• Finding an optimal balance between reliability, maintainability and product lifecycle cost
• The Potential-to-Failure (P-F) Concept
• The types of availability: Operational Availability (Ao), Inherent Availability (Ai), and Achieved Availability (Aa), and how to calculate each
• The relationship between Availability to Reliability and Maintainability

Requirements

• Product Development & Systems Engineering Foundations
• Algebra I & II
• Applied Statistics (helpful but not required)
• Trigonometry / Pre-Calculus (helpful but not required)
• Calculus I (Limits & Derivatives) (helpful but not required)
• Calculus II (Integration, sequences & series) (helpful but not required)

Target audience

• Product Development Managers & Executives
• Project Managers
• Systems Engineers
• Development team members
• Design Engineers
• Hardware Engineers
• Process Engineers
• Maintenance Professionals
• Logisticians
• Reliability Newcomers