Reliability Prediction for System Designs with Outsourced Components

该项目的目标是预测其零部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，因为运营和劳动力成本较低。然而，外包组件的详细设计大多是组件设计人员的专利，对系统设计人员来说是黑匣子。这对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。该项目进行可行性研究，以探索系统设计人员预测系统可靠性的可能方法，而不会透露外包组件的专有细节。因此，该项目帮助工程师制造更可靠、更安全、更便宜的产品，从而提高竞争力和改善生活质量。这项研究可能会影响设计方法的广泛领域和广泛的工程应用，从大型结构系统到小型集成电路系统。除了工程设计，该项目还有益于系统工程、可靠性工程和运筹学，在这些领域，系统可靠性起着至关重要的作用。这项研究从部件和系统两个层面进行可靠性预测。从组件设计的角度来看，这个项目决定了供应商应该向系统设计人员提供什么可靠性信息以及如何提供这些信息。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。从系统设计的角度出发，本项目为系统设计人员提供了理论依据，以便他们能够利用上述部件信息来重构部件可靠性模型，以适应部件故障之间的依赖关系，从而为系统配置、优化、生命周期成本、维护和保修等决策提供准确的系统可靠性预测。

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.