TABLE OF CONTENTS Supportability engineering activities encompass all aspects of system design. A system that does not have adequate and appropriate supportability characteristics cannot be supported. Three of the principal supportability characteristics of any design are its reliability, maintainability, and testability. These three areas contribute significantly to the overall supportability of the system. Failure modes, effects, and criticality analysis (FMECA) is one of the most important design tools available to integrate these engineering disciplines into the systems engineering process. Therefore, a detailed discussion of each of these engineering specialty disciplines is important to understand how they participate in design decisions, the various analysis techniques used, and how their efforts ultimately lead to a supportable design.
Reliability is the term used most commonly to express a desire or confidence in a system to perform as required, but sooner or later all systems break. The more often a system breaks, the less amount of time it is available for use, and the greater is the amount of resources required to support it. The purpose of reliability engineering is to address this problem of how to limit the number of times that an item will break over its useful life. Reliability engineering's effort is really twofold: (1) participation in the design and development of the system to make it as failure-free as possible, and (2) predicting how the system will fail when it is being used so that adequate resources will be available to make repairs. The results of these tasks are used...
