A nontraditional approach to reliability [fighter aircraft application]

The author suggests that 85% of the reliability factors that influence the customer´s cost of ownership are established prior to full-scale development; therefore reliability needs to be considered before that point. To that end, the author has prototyped an expert system which recommends a prioritized list of design alternatives to improve the reliability of the system under study. When faced with a design problem, the designer can use the expert system to derive a thorough list of preassessed design alternatives