Basic Concepts, Quality & Reliability (RAMS) Assurance of Complex Equipment & Systems

Considering that complex equipment and systems are generally repairable, contain redundancy and must be safe, the term reliability appears often for reliability, availability, maintainability, and safety. RAMS is used to point out this wherever necessary in this book. The purpose of reliability engineering is to develop methods and tools to assess RAMS figures of components, equipment and systems, as well as to support development and production engineers in building in these characteristics. In order to be cost and time effective, reliability (RAMS) engineering must be integrated in the project activities, support quality assurance and concurrent engineering efforts, and be performed without bureaucracy. This chapter introduces basic concepts, shows their relationships, and discusses the tasks necessary to assure quality and reliability (RAMS) of complex equipment and systems with high quality and reliability (RAMS) requirements. A comprehensive list of definitions with comments is given in Appendix A1. Standards for quality and reliability (RAMS) assurance are discussed in Appendix A2. Refinements of management aspects are in Appendices A3 - A5. Risk management is considered in Sections 1.2.7 and 6.11.