Systematic approach for the integration and planning of an efficient reliability assurance of product variants based on the Model of PGE – Product Generation Engineering

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The development of product variants is constantly increasing due to the growing demand for product individualization. Development processes are therefore adapted to variant development in order to find the company-specific optimal number of variants with regard to costs and benefits. On the one hand, product variants often share characteristics, but also show differences in product design or product use or purpose. These differences have different effects on the failure behavior of the respective product variant, which leads to new challenges in the reliability and lifetime assurance. Since in most cases it is not possible to physically describe the failure mechanisms, reliability assurance is based on empirical life data from reliability tests. During development only cost-intensive prototypes can be used, which is why testing all product variants is not expedient. However, the reliability cannot be transferred to other variants either, since even small differences (such as greater load from other product use) can result in major changes in failure behavior.The objective of the common research project is therefore the development of a procedure for the expenditure-reduced reliability assurance during the variant development by the systematic analysis of similarities on basis of the model of the PGE - product generation development. With the identified similarities reliability information shall be transferred to product variants. This is based on approaches to use prior knowledge in reliability test planning, which reduces the testing effort significantly. The reuse and further use of the reliability information enables a highly reduced effort for reliability assurance. At the same time, the systematic analysis of the similarities still guarantees a valid reliability assurance.In addition, the new procedure is intended to enable conclusions to be drawn at an early stage of development about the effects of product variants on the effort required for reliability assurance. Thus it can be determined whether the benefit aimed at by the product variant can be justified in relation to the expected expenditure for reliability assurance. This comparison forms the basis for the optimization of the product variant.