TABLE OF CONTENTS We partition the life cycle into the following phases:
Concept;
Development;
O&M.
Of these, the development phase usually has the greatest impact on reliability, and it will receive special emphasis in this chapter. The target of the failure prevention effort will be referred to as the system. The system can be a space mission (a single-use project) or a digital control system, of which thousands of copies will be produced. In the latter case the concern is with the product reliability, and we refer to this as a product system. The life cycles of the single-use and product systems have much in common and will mostly be discussed together.
Reliability activities over the life cycle are usually documented in a reliability program plan. Of course, this plan must be integrated with the project's general life-cycle events, and therefore the first section of this chapter introduces the format and terminology of a project life cycle. After that, we describe the reliability issues that arise in the life-cycle phases. The structure and content of a reliability program plan are presented in Section 8.3. Key elements of life-cycle activities are reviews and audits, and aspects of these important to failure prevention are presented in Section 8.4. This is followed by a section on monitoring requirements. The chapter concludes with a summary.
All but trivial projects involve the collaboration of several organizations and multiple individuals within each organization. To coordinate these diverse efforts a number...
