The objective of this project is to redesign reliability and availability assessments so that they are more suited to support decision-making in early design phases. Today, the assessments are often carried out too late to have an impact on system architecture. It is paramount to frame assessments so that all relevant factors of importance to reliability and availability are captured, including e.g. weight and modularization and location of components.

The first phase of the project focuses on understanding in more detail the industrial status and challenges on the use of reliability and availability assessments for qualification of new technology. Two research topics have been circled out as being the most important:

• How should RAMS requirements be formulated to give suitable balanced functional as well as non-functional (e.g. construction and weight) requirements and constraints
• What is a suitable RAMS model to support early design evaluations.