ABSTRACT
Non-compliance with contractual terms concerning Reliability, Availability and Maintainability (RAM) can have significant financial impact on the profitability of technical projects due to e.g. penalties or warranty costs. Often, these terms are stipulated in complex (multi-party) contractual agreements. In practice, these contracts are captured as natural language prose and this can lead to ambiguities, inconsistencies or incompleteness. In this paper, we present the benefits obtained when RAM contracts have a precise formal description expressed in a semantically rich language. Examples of benefits are advanced validation and consistency checks such as overlap of time periods, gaps in warranties between parties, transfer of risks to other parties, even before a numerical evaluation is performed. We present a brief theoretical background of the approach, an illustration by means of exemplary contractual warranty terms, and give an outlook on further possibilities and advantages.
