Long-Term Missile Aging Reliability Prediction for Advanced Platforms

GMD weapon elements have been developed primarily from test elements which have been modified through time, Politics, Budgets, Missions, technological advances to become the fielded defense system. Given the nature of GMDs approach to fielding the system and it"s ever changing Mission, GMD is using a phased developmental approach in order to focus on improvements that will create new system capabilities. This phased approach reusing old missile components, supplementing them with newer and improved capabilities creates the need for a longer shelf life for all missile components. Increasing shelf life for such a complex system which is comprised of complex systems is a very large task. The control of shelved parts, components, assemblies, which may be geographic disparity, would require a distributed system with access points for warehouser, manufactures, assemblers, integrators", and testers. The system would provide for data processing, data logging, observation of shelved parts, and observation of parts under Accelerated lifecycle testing. Ultimately the data and its analysis would be used to identify parts that fail prior to the expected shelf life. This would allow for the correction of the failure at every point in the components life (production, test, depot, deployment). STAI"s proposal is a solution.