What is our viewpoint, how a contribution to solve this problem could look like?
Well, we have a long experience of using modelbased technologies and graphical building blocks to capture and evaluate system expertise in a very modular and reusable way. And especially we have been dealing with modeling faults and failures in components, items, functions, systems over may years, helping to understand complexity.
A lot of real-world application projects, discussions with customers over many years and – not least: reviewing common safety standards and risk assessment procedures like IEC 61508, IEC13847, ISO26262, ARP4754/ARP4761 etc. – allowed us to gather a better understanding of what could be helpful.
With this background an idea has been developped over time to support the RAMST-analyses by an integrated library of ready-made models, which should be …
- simple and intuitive enough to make it easy to use for the engineer,
- generic enough to be used throughout various technical and even non-technical disciplines and
- powerful enough to easily solve analyses for reliability, safety, availability, maintainability and testability and ideally also
- flexible enough to allow also to analyse other aspects, not yet covered in the classical RAMST-tools. Financial features for example.
Now we have started to implement this idea and set up a first version of a graphical model-library that we have given the working name “SmartRAMS“. SmartRAMS, because it should enable “a bit” smarter solution of RAMS-analyses along various phases of product development, starting as early as the system requirements specification.
The Idea