| How to calculate the MTBF & MTTR values. |
There are several standards (handbooks) used by the reliability engineering world. The most used standard are:
For example, if you want to calculate the MTBF of IC, MIL-HDBK-217 approach , you need to know parameters like: Package, pin number, power max dissipated, thermal resistance, etc. The same chip in Bellcore approach, you need to know less parameters like: package, IC Technologies, transistor or gate or bit number. For the Bellcore standard you need less parameters to calculate the MTBF parameter. For more detailed information, in the section Reliability prediction, sub-section Environmental conditions there is a brief description of environmental conditions for Bellcore and MIL-S217. Regarding MTTR, this parameter is defined as: the average time it takes to repair a failed component. The time to repair include several activities like: Preparation time, active maintenance time and delay time (logistics time). There are 4 methods to predict the MTTR of a system, but the most used is based on summing the product of the expected repair times of the individual failures modes (Full Maintenance Time - FMT) and dividing by the sum of the individual failure rates. When you perform MTTR calcultion you build a top down tree with block and sublock. If a block has not sub blocks (leaf block), this means it is replaced as a whole unit when fails and is discarded. Its Full Maintenance Time (FMT) includes only replacement operations named Maintenance Time (MT): disconnection, detection, replacement, connection and testing. If a block has sub blocks, then it is repaired, e.g. fail sub blocks are removed from it and repaired or replaced. There may be 2 cases:
|