Did RAMS Deliver on this Year’s Theme?

Abstract

Chris and Joe Bell from G2OPs talk about systems engineering and how it relates to reliability engineering. Joe and his team focus on Model Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) and was hoping to learn more about reliability and MBSE at the 2020 Reliability and Maintainability Symposium (RAMS). Was RAMS successful in helping out Joe? Listen to this podcast to learn more.

Key Points

Joe Bell from G2OPs works with a lot of Department of Defense (DoD) clients, and historical systems engineering approaches are based on paper, PowerPoint files, Excel spreadsheets and so on. From Joe’s perspective, MBSE differs primarily from traditional systems engineering by using the Systems Modeling Language (SysML). Does this work?

Topics include:

SysML is a general-purpose digital modeling language for systems engineering, is open source, and is at least an attempt to be
The challenge of working with reliability? There is so much reliability software out there that it makes it difficult to work out how to find the balance between having reliability engineering capability embedded within MBSE through SysML versus a function to export data to be analysed externally. And not a lot of work has been undertaken to work tis out.
Does the RAMS MBSE theme permeate across they symposium? No. It could be because the topic is so new, but there weren’t a lot of answers regarding incorporating reliability into MBSE or SysML. And of the discussions that were based on MBSE, they were very high level and driven by academia. The granular discussions at the practitioner levels were simply not happening.
Links to the DoD. The DoD is looking at embedding MBSE into acquisition contracts, but perhaps don’t have all the answers regarding ‘how.’ Particularly when it comes to reliability engineering. So this is making it challenging in terms of what do we do next?
What would be a good first step? Simple, autogenerating plug-ins (for things like FMEAs) that aren’t too simple but are useful and not formulaic. All based on a ‘single source of truth’ in a SysML environment. Joe works with the US Navy, and you can’t do the same levels of testing that the Army an do (… there are a lot fewer aircraft carriers than tanks). So things like FMEAs are really useful in managing risk.
Final thoughts on RAMS and MBSE. Joe pointed out that there were a lot of reliability engineers who (at times) tried to focus on MBSE – not a lot of systems engineers working through reliability problems. And the majority of the symposium did not focus on MBSE.

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