BRIDGING RELIABILITY ENGINEERING AND SYSTEMS ENGINEERING

The increasing application of sensors, actuators, and complex algorithms for delivering artificial intelligence and connectivity in products and product-systems will drive an unprecedented growth in design complexity and software content, making it increasingly more difficult to ensure dependability in an economical manner. Much learning about the dependability of such new and innovative products is likely to happen as they are conceived and designed. Consequently, accelerated verification and validation iterations supported by easy and rapid storage and retrieval of failure knowledge must be enabled. No single software solutions provider effectively covers all three critical areas required for developing and delivering dependable smart connected products, namely, reliability engineering, systems engineering, and failure knowledge management. This paper mainly presents a potential map of the commonly used reliability engineering tools overlaid on the systems engineering technical processes. The paper recommends including a formal knowledge storage and retrieval system in the closed-loop between systems engineering and reliability engineering so that the details observed in past failures are not missed in future design iterations.