Reliability Prediction for System Designs with Outsourced Components

该项目的目标是预测其组件外包给外部供应商的产品的系统可靠性。外包是一种常见的做法，因为较低的运营和劳动力成本。然而，外包组件的详细设计大多是组件设计人员专有的，对系统设计人员来说是黑盒。这给系统设计人员在系统设计阶段评估系统可靠性提出了很大的挑战。本项目进行可行性研究，以探索系统设计人员在不披露外包组件专有细节的情况下预测系统可靠性的可能方法。因此，该项目可以帮助工程师制造更可靠、更安全、更便宜的产品，从而提高竞争力，改善生活质量。这项研究可能会影响广泛的领域的设计方法和广泛的工程应用，从大型结构系统到小型集成电路系统。除了工程设计之外，该项目还有利于系统工程，可靠性工程和运营研究，其中系统可靠性起着至关重要的作用。本研究解决了组件和系统级别的可靠性预测。从组件设计的角度来看，该项目确定了供应商应该向系统设计人员提供哪些可靠性信息以及如何提供。这些信息将足以进行系统可靠性分析，供应商的专有信息也将受到保护。从系统设计的角度，本计画提供理论给系统设计者，使他们可以利用上述元件资讯，重建元件可靠性模型，以容纳元件故障间的相依性，进而产生精确的系统可靠性预测，以供系统组态、最佳化、寿命周期成本、维修、保证等决策之用。

The goal of this project is to predict the system reliability of products whose components are outsourced to outside suppliers. Outsourcing is a common practice because of lower operational and labor costs. The detailed designs of outsourced components, however, are mostly proprietary to component designers and are black boxes to system designers. This poses a great challenge for system designers to estimate the system reliability during the system design stage. This project performs feasibility studies to explore possible ways for system designers to predict the system reliability without revealing proprietary details of outsourced components. As a result, this project offers to help engineers make more reliable, safer, and cheaper products, thereby increasing competitiveness and improving quality of life. This research could impact broad areas of design methodologies and wide engineering applications, ranging from large structural systems to small integrated circuit systems. Beyond engineering design, this project also benefits system engineering, reliability engineering, and operations research where system reliability plays a vital role. This research addresses reliability prediction at both component and system levels. From the perspective of component design, this project determines what reliability information a supplier should provide to system designers and how to do so. The information will be sufficient for system reliability analysis, and the proprietary information of the supplier will also be protected. From the perspective of system design, this project provides theories to system designers so that they could use the above component information to reconstruct component reliability models that accommodate dependencies between component failures, thereby producing an accurate system reliability prediction for decision making on system configurations, optimization, life cycle cost, maintenance, warranty, and so on.