R&M~CAE in a joint venture [electronic warfare]

In a joint-venture environment, the integration of reliability and maintainability (R&M) into the computed-aided design process is complicated by achieving compatibility between, as well as within, the joint-venture team members. As part of the integrated electronic warfare system (INEWS) demonstration/validation phase supportability risk reduction task, a suite of R&M tools were developed and integrated into a prototype design workstation. The authors address the background, approach, barriers, project results, lessons learned and conclusions/recommendations for the effort. The joint venture team developed and demonstrated a prototype CAD/CAE-RAMCAD (R&M computer-aided design) workstation that reflected a point-of-design (concurrent engineering) approach to integration of R&M into CAE. The major issues were associated with the dissimilarities between and within firms, the lack of existing interface adapters and the inability to upgrade existing CAD/CAE. These barriers were overcome by standardizing the systems and writing the interfaces