Reliability Prediction for System Designs with Outsourced Components

这个项目的目标是预测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，因为它的操作和劳动力成本较低。然而，外包组件的详细设计大多是组件设计人员专有的，而对系统设计人员来说则是黑盒。这给系统设计者在系统设计阶段对系统可靠性的估计提出了很大的挑战。该项目执行可行性研究，探索系统设计者在不透露外包组件的专有细节的情况下预测系统可靠性的可能方法。因此，这个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，提高生活质量。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。在工程设计之外，该项目还有利于系统工程、可靠性工程和运筹学，其中系统可靠性起着至关重要的作用。本研究从组件和系统两个层面进行可靠性预测。本项目从组件设计的角度出发，确定供应商应向系统设计人员提供哪些可靠性信息以及如何提供。这些信息将足以用于系统可靠性分析，并且供应商的专有信息也将得到保护。本项目从系统设计的角度出发，为系统设计者提供理论依据，使他们能够利用上述组件信息重构组件可靠性模型，以适应组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、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.