Tutorial 3

9:00 to 10:30 a.m. Friday, October 15, 2010

Understanding MTBF for Repairable Systems

For large, custom designed systems (e.g. new power plants, production lines, communication systems, fleets of military hardware), failures are observed during the implementation phase. Developers are normally given a target MTBF to be achieved as part of the contract requirements. As developers attempt to deal with those failures, the MTBF keeps on improving. The first case study in this tutorial illustrates how to track the changing MTBF using statistical methods to prove that the demonstrated MTBF has met the contract requirement. The second case study uses the same methodology to track the changing MTBF for an aging system’s fleet.

Key Words: MTBF, Contract, Aging Systems, Target MTBF

Hongan Lin

ReliaSoft Asia