SoSE 2018 Special Session on Reliability in System of Systems Engineering

Reliability in SoS.pdf

Special session summary

Since its origination in the 1940s, the field of reliability engineering has developed significantly. Specifically the understanding, planning, evaluation, and verification of reliability has made significant contributions in product engineer, where data tends to be abundant. However, the field of reliability engineering remains grossly underdeveloped for SoS.Two specific reasons for this including organizational perceptions and the challenge of designing modern SoS.

The first key issue for reliability in SoS is how organizations perceive it. In a general sense, reliability is viewed as a “check the box” activity. As a result, it has a tendency to be applied late in the design process and therefore provide minimal value toward affecting the SoS. In this classic “chicken-and-egg” scenario, reliability has shown to have limited valuable when applied late in the design process, and at the same time, has not been shown to have value when applied early in the design process. It is unclear whether the lack of usefulness pushed reliability toward the end of design or whether it began there and didn’t offer enough value to be considered earlier. However, recent research indicates that applying reliability techniques early in design can provide significant value.

A separate key issue for reliability is the challenge of keeping up with modern design.With the sharp increase in SoS complexity, reliability issues have become challenging to understand and assess. Tradition reliability methods are generic and tend to be limited in terms of scaling to highly-complex SoS. Further, organizations such as the Department of Defense (DoD), Raytheon, Boeing, L3, Lockheed Martin, etc., are imposing more reliability requirements than have been imposed in the past. These requirements are being required earlier in the design process to ensure that reliability is natural element of the design.To complicate this scenario further, design processes are being shortened to meet higher level operational capabilities. To date the supporting reliability methods to successfully overcome this challenge have not been developed.

The purpose of this session is to attract reliability-related research that help to understand, plan, evaluate, and verify the reliability of a SoS during the early stages of the design process.

Special session key words

Reliability Engineering, Risk Engineering, Engineering Design, Design Theory and Methodology, System Engineering, Systems of Systems Engineering, Complex Systems.

Organisers

Submission guidelines