MODELING AND MONITORING THE DECAY OF EQUIPMENT RELIABILITY

This paper presents the results of an investigation into the reliability degradation of airborne equipment. The aim of the investigation is to automate the reliability monitoring function as much as possible. Results have demonstrated that the methods outlined in this paper are workable in practice. The service life performance of a range of equipment in a variety of operating environments can be described by the Duane model with adjustments to allow for reliability decay. This reinforces findings reported previously [1]. The model is also applicable to other rate parameters such as maintenance man-hours per operating hour or no-fault-found rates. It is superior to methods currently in use to identify performance degradation when time-between-failure data is not available. Use of this model improves the predictions about the long-term performance of equipment which in turn enables a better estimate of logistics and maintenance resource requirements.