Reliability Analysis and Project Tracking Environment (RAPTRE) Tool

"Military program offices are challenged to make effective reliability decisions throughout development and acquisition programs. The decisions range from determining what reliability requirements to specify to assure that the system users' mission needsare met to selecting the most effective means of assessing whether the system reliability is adequate to pass through various program decision "gates." These challenges are often faced by personnel with varying reliability-specific experience and trainingwho have multiple program responsibilities and, therefore, need the benefit of the accumulated knowledge and expertise that a tool like RAPTRE offers. The proposed RAPTRE tool will bring together the types of decision rules, analysis tools, checklists, aswell as other forms of reliability knowledge, information and data to facilitate the decision making process. The tool's project tracking capability will provide a mechanism for measuring the effectiveness of reliability approaches in the form of lessonslearned and metrics tracking allowing it to "learn" from continued use. Although the RAPTRE tool will be developed for the military, it has tremendous long term commercial potential as well. The development of RAPTRE will greatly facilitate the reliabilitydecision making process for military programs but it will also be very useful outside the military. Other government organizations like NASA, the FAA and NOAA face many of the same rel