Designing for success: reliability technology in the concurrent engineering era

Research on the applicability of reliability tools and practices to the needs of the design process is discussed. The requirement to streamline the design, development, and approval phases implies that reliability must be considered on an up-front and ongoing basis to reduce significantly the likelihood of catastrophic failures after the fact. Uncertainty is an ever present factor in the design process since the nature of design requires the envelope of experience to be pushed to its limits. It is noted that the key to successful design in the concurrent engineering era is to admit to and characterize the uncertainties to allow a design to be specified which is sufficiently robust. The author discusses principles of design risk analysis and outlines an approach for characterizing uncertainty in a semiquantitative manner such that it is applicable to design reliability analysis