Reliability Growth for Military Vehicles –Emerging Methodology and Remaining Challenges

Military vehicles require very high levels of reliability in order to be fully effective, rapidly deployable, and affordable. For the larger weapon system platforms, reliability improvements of only ten percent can result in savings in the billions of dollars over the life cycle of the system. Reliability growth methodology and techniques have helped a large number of developmental programs structure testing and engineering activities to achieve the desired levels of reliability. Reliability growth provides a means to systematically address the failure modes that are not eliminated during early design activities. This paper addresses some of the advancements in reliability growth methodology and highlights a few of the remaining challenges.