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 / Fehlerrate
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.
