New thinking and methodologies on reliability engineering

Traditional Reliability Engineering lacks powerful methods and tools on earlier development stages; it takes less effect on product conception definition and system design. There are also some tough problems for applying Traditional Reliability approaches on civil products, such as how to develop high reliable products with Commercial, off-the-shelf (COTS) components? How to greatly reduce the time and cost of ESS and reliability evaluation? How to make reliability engineering more effective on products? And so on. Based on the 25 years practices and experiences on Reliability Engineering, Quality Engineering and Robust Design, the author and his group bring forward many new thinking and methods for life cycle of product in this paper, such as QFD for customer requirements analysis; Axiomatic Design and TRIZ for conception definition and system design; set of methods for COTS component selection and Q&R management; DFX, DOE, parameter design and tolerance design for product detailed design and optimization; HALT, HASS, SPC, CPK and Signal to Noise Ratio for product verification and manufacturing, Generalized FRACAS and eight Low-Cost Reliability Growth approaches for product life cycle, etc. These new thinking and methods have been integrated with a set of selected, effective and modified regular RAMS tools. Applying the above new thinking and methodologies, we can make the reliability of products up, cost down and lead time shortened simultaneously. We have practiced the above new thinking and methodologies for six or seven years. It is proved by a number of case studies that these new thinking and methodologies are correct and adequate for any products, especially for civil products, and will definitely find wide applications.