ABSTRACT
Global competition as well as increasing customer demands are placing constant pressures on manufacturers to reduce product-development cycle times and costs. As a result, there is considerable interest in methods for developing new products quickly and cost-effectively while also ensuring high quality and reliability. Physical testing of prototypes is the traditional approach for assessing and improving product reliability during the design and development stage. Since this is costly and time consuming, there is now increasing reliance on computer-aided-engineering (CAE) techniques for analyzing, optimizing, and proving product reliability and robustness [1, 2].
