ABSTRACT

When developing a system, one of the biggest challenges is to optimize the balance between performance, quality, and cost in a dynamic, international, market. Reliability is an important factor when designing any system, and it is directly linked to the system’s quality and performance. The system that is being developed needs to be reliable enough to work over the time period specied by the stakeholders. It is also not enough to only design a system up to its launch. For example, a system that meets the stakeholder’s functional requirements but is only available 10% of the time is not very useful or practical. As John Hsu and Satoshi Nagano state, “the success of aerospace programs is directly linked to the successful application of the systems engineering (SE) invoked from program initiation through program closure” (Hsu and Nagano 2011). Support for a system does not end until its termination, and until then that system needs to be efciently and effectively maintained.