Development of a design-for-reliability method for complex systems

Nowadays, industrial competition is based on the Total Cost Ownership of the products (TCO). This is particularly true for big complex systems such as helicopters, for which the maintenance costs, often take the largest part of this TCO. Thus the challenge for such integrators is to invest in reliability engineering projects aimed at increasing their product´s reliability to market them with the lowest TCO. To do so, industrialists need tools allowing them to predict the gain on products TCO realized with the development of reliability increasing projects during the design phase. Because of the complexity of the reliability parameter, the existing reliability engineering tools are not directly applicable and require to be adapted for a complete and direct exploitation in industry.