Course Aim

This Reliability Allocation (or apportionment) Course teaches students how to create ‘lower-level’ reliability performance goals based on system level specifications.  Without reliability allocation, system level goals would not ‘mean anything’ for component and subsystem design teams. Nor would the design team leader be able to manage (typically) scarce product development resources on the issues and parts that really matter. We always want to know that the goals we give to components and subsystems make sure the system meets its goals when we have finished integration.

But the most important aspect of reliability allocation is that it is part of an ongoing and iterative design effort. You waste your time coming up with the ‘perfectly’ allocated goals at the start of the design process. In this course, we teach you how to start allocating reliability goals to components and subsystems and then manage the ongoing reliability design effort. Sometimes, this means ending up with subsystem and component goals that bear little resemblance to the ones you started with – but creates a reliable product that is efficiently and effectively designed and manufactured.

Students who are design team leaders, managers, or reliability engineers responsible for designing complex systems to meet high-level reliability performance requirements.

Course Outline

Introduction | What is reliability? | Overview of reliability allocation | Gathering information | Establishing system reliability performance ang goals | Determining reliability design margin | Preliminary functional series design | Allocating reliability | Managing reliability allocation | Approaches to identifying allocation factors (including links to FMEAs and FMECAs) | Special case of reliability performance | Allocating availability | Allocating MTBF

Course Material

The following resources will be provided to attendees of this course:

1. An editable PDF course workbook