Systems engineering focuses on how to design and manage products or systems over their Life cycles.
Design of critical systems requires detailed attention to aspects of Reliability, Availability, Maintainability, and Safety (RAMS).
Indeed, Functional Safety standards such as IEC 61508 detail the Safety and Reliability tasks that should be carried out on each step of the system life cycle.
Therefore, system engineers must integrate RAMS into the design process.
BQR offers software and consulting services for the whole range of traditional RAMS tasks, as well as for innovative processes that greatly reduce development cost and time for electronics.
The following figure presents BQR software modules, and how they correspond to the system Life-Cycle “V” model
Topic | Meaning |
Reliability Allocation | Allocate component failure rates in order to meet the system level reliability requirements |
Failure Modes And Effects Analysis (FMEA) | Review the chains of effects from component failure mode, up to the system level. Identify and mitigate single points of failure |
Schematic Review | Logical analysis of an electronic circuit design in order to identify design errors |
Electrical Stress Derating | Assess how electrical stress (Current, Voltage and Power) reduces the rating electronic components, and identify over-stress |
Reliability Analysis | Calculate the reliability and availability of complex systems, accounting for redundancies, fault tolerance, repair policies and logistics |
Circuit Simulation | Simulate the stresses (current, voltage and power) in an electronic circuit, identify over stress, voltage mismatch and other design errors |
Failure Modes, Effects, and Criticality Analysis (FMECA) | Similar to FMEA, using component failure rates in order to achieve higher analysis precision |
Testability Analysis | Review the level of coverage that a Built In Test (BIT) plan provides, as well as the isolation level |
Fault Tree Analysis (FTA) | While FMECA analyzes the possible effects of single failure modes, FTA analyzes combinations of events that can lead to safety events |
Maintainability Analysis | Estimate Mean Time To Repair (MTTR), spare parts and logistics, maintenance tasks, preventive maintenance and inspection plans |
Maintenance & Logistics plan optimization | Optimize the maintenance and logistics plan in order to minimize cost while maintaining a high asset availability |
Field Data Analysis | When the asset is operating, failure and maintenance data is accumulated. Analysis of the field data can provide real failure distributions, repair times, and P-F times (time from potential failure to actual failure). The resulting data can be used to further optimize the maintenance and logistics |