Lifecycle Test Optimization

Reliability of vehicles is of critical importance to the US Army.Army regulation 702-19 states Component and subsystem level reliability, availability, and maintenance (RAM) testing will be planned and funded early in the development phase with prioritization based on those areas where the potential return on the investment (in terms of system level RAM) is assessed to be the greatest.Such RAM testing will be conducted well before the components are incorporated into system prototypes and system level RAM testing begins.The objective of this SBIR project to develop and deploy a system reliability testing and optimization tool which will identify the value of the subsystem level tests and incorporate the results into system level evaluations addresses this regulatory need.This research will develop a software tool that will utilize component/subsystem reliability assessed through tests to determine the system level reliability; optimize the amount of component/subsystem testing for reducing the cost of conducting a small number of tests but at the same time avoid increasing the risk due to the small number of tests; and develop capabilities and information that will assist with the overall test planning.