Reliability modeling for systems requiring mission reconfigurability

Guidelines are presented for the reliability engineer in which reconfiguration is used to determine a mission´s mean time between critical failures (MTBCF). MTBCF refers to the mean operating time until a critical failure occurs, starting with a fault-free system. This method has been used to evaluate reliability on the integrated communication, navigation, and identification avionics (ICNIA) program, which has multiple mission profiles and the ability to reconfigure common modules through software initiation. Strengths and weaknesses in the MIL standard for this type of evaluation are pointed out, and the use of a mathematical technique, familiar to most reliability engineers, for evaluating systems with common reconfigurable modules is discussed