This course focuses on actions project Managers and Systems Engineers can take to initiate or improve the performance of their systems.

This course covers both ‘design for RM&A’ and ‘RM&A validation’ activities to provide the viewpoints of the system developer and the end user.

This course also covers the essential mathematical calculations that are essential to initiating, specifying and testing RM&A requirements, to and includes the application of how you can use RM&A calculations to estimate and improve your overall system's availability.

In the Reliability Module, we will cover many core principles related to identifying, estimating, calculating and verifying reliability related requirements and models. Topics include common definitions, lifecycle analysis, reliability myths, failures, Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA), failure rates, life data distributions, probability density functions; exponential, logarithmic, gaussian, and Weibull distributions; reliability estimates, the hazard function, MTBF, MTTF, the “bathtub curve” and its 3 regions: DFR, SFR and IFR. You’ll learn about extending a product’s life, reliability calculations using reliability networks, stress and strain analysis, fault trees and FMECA reporting.

In the Maintainability Module, topics include definitions, maintenance levels, FRACAS, Uptime (UT), Downtime (DT), MTTR, preventive and corrective maintenance, maintenance frequency, MTBM, Level Of Repair Analysis (LORA), Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) and Condition-Based Maintenance (CBM), Potential to Functional failures (PF), Maintainability cost, prediction, and allocation, and trade-offs between reliability and maintainability.

In the Availability Module, we use what we learned about R&M and apply it to availability. We also cover the three primary types of availability: Achieved Availability (Aa), Inherent Availability (Ai) and Operational Availability (Ao).

The course concludes by consolidating RM&A topics into a holistic picture. Topics include RM&A challenges, RM&A starting values, testing for reliability & maintainability, RM&A sequential testing and qualification and product life testing.