Reliability, Availability, Maintainability and Safety (RAMS) Consulting
Failure rate calculation is quite simple and straightforward for systems with no redundancies and components with a constant failure rate: one can simply sum the components’ failure rates.
In these cases, the Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF) is also easily calculated:
MTBF=1/Failure Rate
However, systems with fault tolerance, redundancies, and components that age (increasing failure rate in time) are harder to model. Additional details that may affect the system reliability model are: operation profile, spare parts logistics, and scheduled inspections and maintenance.
We at BQR have vast experience with reliability modeling of complex systems, using our software tools:
- Reliability Block Diagram (basic, networks, Markov chain models)
- Fault Tree Analysis which supports common causes and nested common causes
- apmOptimizer
BQR also performs Monte Carlo simulations that can be adapted to fit special cases.
