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

由于对产品个性化的需求日益增长，产品变种的开发不断增加。因此，开发过程要适应变型开发，以便从成本和收益方面找到公司特定变型的最佳数量。一方面，产品变体往往具有共同的特征，但也表现出产品设计或产品用途或用途的差异。这些差异对不同产品变型的失效行为有不同的影响，这对可靠性和寿命保证提出了新的挑战。由于在大多数情况下，无法从物理上描述失效机制，因此可靠性保证是基于可靠性试验的经验寿命数据。在开发过程中，只能使用成本密集型的原型，这就是为什么测试所有产品变体并不有利的原因。然而，可靠性也不能转移到其他变型上，因为即使是微小的差异(例如来自其他产品使用的较大负载)也可能导致故障行为的重大变化。因此，共同研究项目的目标是通过在PGE产品生成开发模型的基础上系统地分析相似性来开发一种在变型开发过程中减少开支的可靠性保证程序。有了识别的相似性，可靠性信息应转移到产品变种。这是基于在可靠性测试计划中使用先验知识的方法，这显著减少了测试工作。可靠性信息的再利用和进一步使用使可靠性保证的工作量大大减少。与此同时，对相似性的系统分析仍然保证了有效的可靠性保证。此外，新程序的目的是使人们能够在开发的早期阶段就产品变种对可靠性保证所需努力的影响得出结论。因此，可以确定与可靠性保证的预期支出相比，该产品变体所针对的好处是否合理。这种比较形成了产品变体优化的基础。

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.