Reliability assessment of aerospace electronic equipment

Reliability assessment has been discussed extensively in the commercial aer ospace and military avionics industries where, unlike most other industries , it is necessary to have formal, quantitative estimates of the reliability of products prior to the start of production. Until recently, handbook dat abases and equations were used almost universally for electronic equipment reliability prediction based on failure rates; however, handbook usage is d eclining and new approaches are needed. Representatives of a large segment of the aerospace industry have worked together to develop an alternative. T he Reliability Assessment Program (RAP) is credible, easy to use and holds promise for wide acceptance. RAP does not prescribe a uniform method for al l users; instead, it is flexible, encouraging the user to take into account all the unique design, manufacturing and use factors critical to the relia bility of the product being assessed. A RAP document is being developed as an industry consensus standard for aerospace electronic equipment manufactu rers to use in documenting their reliability assessment processes, includin g data sources, calculation and analysis methods, results reporting and con tinuous improvement of the assessment process by comparing assessment resul ts with achieved in-service reliability. RAP is described in this paper, al ong with current activities to implement it and gain acceptance across the industry. Copyright (C) 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.