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An overview on reliability,
availability, maintainability and
supportability (RAMS)
engineering
S. Saraswat and G.S. Yadava
Received June 2006
Revised February 2007
Accepted May 2007
Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, India
Abstract
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of RAMS engineering in industry and
research.
Design/methodology/approach – A range of research articles (1988-2005) covering RAMS
engineering is discussed to provide a practical and theoretical overview of RAMS engineering in
industry and research.
Findings – The paper provides information about the current scenario and also about the past
scenario of RAMS engineering in research and industry.
Research limitations/implications – This paper reviews much of the literature on RAMS
engineering. The literature is collected from major journals and conference proceedings, the period
covered is from 1988 to 2005. The authors have tried to make it reasonably comprehensive, but those
papers which are not included were either inadvertently overlooked or considered peripheral to this
survey. In the present work the authors have only considered those articles which have included two
or more aspects of RAMS.
Practical implications – The paper is a very useful source of information for researchers working
in the area of RAMS engineering.
Originality/value – This paper offers help to researchers in understanding the current and past
status of RAMS.
Keywords Maintenance, Research, Reliability management
Paper type General review
International Journal of Quality &
Reliability Management
Vol. 25 No. 3, 2008
pp. 330-344
q Emerald Group Publishing Limited
0265-671X
DOI 10.1108/02656710810854313
1. Introduction
Modern technology has developed a tendency to design and manufacture equipment
and systems of greater capital cost, sophistication, complexity, and capacity. The
disastrous consequences of low availability and high maintenance cost of such systems
led to the desire for high reliability, high maintainability, and low mean time to
support. Due to design problems and poor product support, manufacturer equipment
and systems are not able to meet these requirements. However with proper
consideration of reliability, availability, maintainability and supportability (RAMS) in
the design, manufacturing, and installation phase, the number of failure could be
reduced and their consequences minimized.
Various design techniques and concepts are available in literature (as described in
numerous handbooks, standards, and references), related to design for RAMS or
individual aspect thereof. Although these techniques are applied with more or less
success in some industry sectors, of which the defense industry is a notable example, in
general, industry does not apply these known techniques.
This paper reviews much of the literature on RAMS engineering. The literature is
collected from major journals and conference proceedings as shown in Table I; the
period covered is from 1988 to 2005. We have tried to be reasonably complete, but those
papers, which are not included, were either inadvertently overlooked or considered
peripheral to this survey. We apologize to readers as well as to researchers if we have
omitted any relevant papers.
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331
2. Overview
The literature pertaining to RAMS engineering is classified into five groups namely:
(1) Assessment of RAMS parameters.
(2) Methodologies for RAMS analysis.
(3) Support, design, LCC and other issues.
(4) Simulation or modeling for RAMS.
(5) Books for RAMS.
2.1 Assessment of RAMS parameters
DuJulio and Leet (1988) have presented space station synergetic RAM-Logististics
analysis, this study emphasizes to analyze the maintenance activities and processes that
can be accomplished on-orbit within the known design and support constraints of the
space station. Wood (1989) has developed equations for the availability of a system with
exhaustible spares. Terje and Grundt (1989) discussed how catastrophic events should
be treated when assessing availability. Bluvband (1990) has presented a technique for
tracking the systems availability growth during development and testing so that
decision regarding proposed changes can be evaluated. Cockerill (1990) has presented a
RAM (Reliability, Availability, and Maintainability) analysis of a turbine-generator
system. McFadden (1990) has proposed the techniques for developing the database for
reliability, availability and maintainability improvement program for an industrial plant
or commercial building. Nurie (1990) has discussed that good testability and higher fault
coverage tests provide high quality. Without adequate fault coverage, bad parts pass the
acceptance test and are installed in the final product, resulting in a product with very low
reliability. Mi (1991) has presented a methodology for system, which consists of n
independent subsystems connected in series. Prince and Haire (1991) presented some
Markov models to evaluate the impact of maintenance system availability on the overall
plant. Kumar et al. (1992) have presented some results from an analytic study of
reliability and availability of the crystallization system in sugar plants.
Serial no.
Source
1.
2.
3.
IEEE Transactions on Reliability
Reliability Engineering and Safety of Systems
Proceedings of the Annual Reliability and
Maintainability Symposium
Journal of Quality in Maintenance
International Journal of Quality and Reliability
Journal of Microelectronics and Reliability
4.
5.
6.
Table I.
Sources of most of
the references
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Zhao (1994) proposed a generalized availability model for repairable components and
series systems. Also said that lifetime of a repaired component has a general
distribution, which can be different from that of a new component. Sericola (1994) has
proposed a new way to compute the distribution when the model is a two-state
semi-Markov process in which the holding times have an exponential distribution for
the operational state and a phase-type distribution for the non-operational one. Vaurio
(1995) has developed general recursive models for the unavailability and the
mission-failure probability of standby equipment subject to periodic testing. Le (1995)
presented availability analysis which includes events other then hardware faults.
Carlier et al. (1996) have evaluated the reliability, availability, maintainability and
safety requirements for manned space vehicle with extended on-orbit stay time.
Oliveto (1999) has developed a mathematical model to partition all of the individual
availabilities of the system from the operational availability of the system. Reineke et al.
(1999) have improved the system availability and expected system cost rate through
age replacement preventive maintenance. Rosin et al. (1999) have presented the
availability analysis of airport runway. Sandberg and Strömberg (1999) described how
the terms system effectiveness from a logistics perspective and life cycle cost
effectiveness were designed into the Gripen combat aircraft and how they are now
being taken care of in the operational phase and in the early concept phase. Chan et al.
(2000) have discussed power-related failure mechanisms in the analysis of wireless
system availability. Hajeeh and Chaudhuri (2000) have worked on reliability and
availability assessment of reverse osmosis, this research work assessed the
performance of reverse osmosis plants in Arabian Gulf region by analyzing its
failure behavior and down time patterns. Zhang and Horigome (2001) studied one kind
of systems that endure environmental shocks, and where one or more components can
fail simultaneously due to a cumulative shock-damage process. An approach for
reliability and availability analysis of such kind of repairable systems is presented,
where failure and repair rates of components can be varying with time. Willard (2001)
discussed the RAMS cost control on air Traffic. Sun and Han (2002) have proposed a
truncated bathtub curve for failure rate, where the infant mortality phase is truncated.
The time-to-failure distribution corresponding to the truncated bathtub failure rate is
composed of exponential distribution and Weibull distribution. Smith and Smith (2002)
have presented a method of calculating system availability and reliability probability
distributions using permutations of inseparable system failure and restore data sets.
Carpaneto et al. (2002) have given a technique to evaluate the reliability indices of
medium voltage distribution systems. Elearth (2003) has described a commonly used
process for assessing system availability using probability block diagrams and
explained the implicit service strategy built into this process also identifies the
common circumstances in which approximation creates significant errors. Rzepka et al.
(2003) have discussed the factors which affects the availability of machine tool. Dai
et al. (2003) have presented a general model for a centralized heterogeneous distributed
system, which is widely used in distributed system design. Fricks and Ketcham (2004)
introduced a novel technique for computing confidence limits associated with
steady-state availability estimation using field failure data. Barabady (2005) presented
reliability and maintainability analysis of crushing plants. In this study crushing
plants are divided into seven subsystems. Reliability analysis has been done for each
subsystem by using failures data.
2.2 Methodologies for RAMS analysis
Jobe (1988) has presented new R&M measures for the systems. The reliability and
maintainability measure is referred to as MTUT. It is the mean time to restore
equipment to its original working status; it is expressed as a proportion of the mean
time to failure for any given equipment. Schroeder and Johnson (1990) have presented a
new availability concept for complex systems and called that complex availability.
Agrafiotis (1990) investigated availability an measure of the system which is obtained
in terms of the repair and failure time distributions and in the form of convolution
integrals which are readily evaluated by means of known computational algorithms.
Moran et al. (1990) described a process set up by Digital Technique in Europe to
monitor and quantify the availability of its systems. Aven (1990) has presented some
simple approximation formulae for the availability of standby redundant systems
comprising similar units that are preventively maintained. Guthrie et al. (1990) have
developed RAM program guidelines. These guidelines present a structured RAM
process for integrating RAM considerations in each defined project phases. Hansen
(1990) has discussed the reliability and maintainability aspects of components in
computer aided engineering. Jokubaitis and Quinn (1992) have discussed the new army
methods for assessing the RAM requirements of a system. Hansen et al. (1992)
developed a RAM expert system (RAMES) to assist a weapon system manager to
conduct weapon system RAM performance analysis. Collas (1994) has given a simple
methodology for assessing the complex system availability and reliability. Madu and
Kuci (1994) have developed a group decision support system framework for adjusting
system availability levels, this study involves studying the system availability
problem as a closed queue where a fixed number of machines are required constantly
in operation.
Fragola and McFadden (1995) have described external maintenance rate prediction
and design concept for high reliability and availability on space station freedom.
Hassett et al. (1995) has combined time varying failure rates and Markov chain
analysis to obtain hybrid reliability and availability analysis. Born and Criscimagna
(1995) developed a methodology to evaluate the need of reliability, maintainability and
diagnostics for translation processes. Mitchell and Murry (1996) presented a
methodology to predict operational availability for systems with redundant,
repairable components and multiple sparing level. Newton (1996) presented his
comments on time-varying failure rates in the availability and reliability analysis of
repairable systems. Tatry et al. (1997) have presented an advance study on RAMS
(reliability, availability, maintainability, and safety) for a reusable launch vehicle.
Dhudshia (1997) has described SEMI E10 (standard for definition and measurement of
equipment reliability, availability and maintainability), which contains key definitions
and formulas as well as confidence limits to characterize semiconductor manufacturing
equipment utilization. Ahrens and Chandra (1999) have presented availability
modeling and validation methodology for RS/6000 systems.
Yang and Klutke (2001) developed a lower bound for the availability of
quantile-based inspection schemes when device lifetimes are assumed to have an
increasing failure rate. Markeset and Kumar (2001) have discussed the application of
reliability, maintainability and risk analysis methods to minimize life cycle cost of the
system. Vintr and Holub (2001) presented R&M requirements for upgrading a system.
Brall (2001) presented the implementation of reliability and maintainability program at
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Landies Gardner resulted in R&M becoming “institutionalized” throughout the
company. Singh and Swaminathan (2002) have presented a methodology for
determining sample sizes for system availability under the assumption that the time
between failures and the times to repair are independently and exponentially
distributed. Yin et al. (2002) presented application of semi-Markov process and CTMC
to evaluation of UPS system. Finkelstein and Zarudnij (2002) developed a model with
the help of Laplace-transforms and fast-repair approximations for multiple availability
and its generalizations. Klutke and Yoonjung (2002) presented the availability of
inspected systems subject to shocks and graceful degradation. de Castro and Cavalca
(2003) have presented an availability optimization problem of an engineering system
assembled in a series configuration which has the redundancy of units and teams of
maintenance as optimization parameters. Biswas et al. (2003) given a methodology to
calculate the availability of periodically inspected system, maintained under an
imperfect-repair policy. Marseguerra et al. (2004) calculated optimal
reliability/availability of uncertain systems via multi-objective genetic algorithms.
Bowles (2004) has developed new productivity tools to improve the reliability and
maintainability of software systems. Jackson et al. (2005) developed a guide for
achieving and assessing RAM.
2.3 Support, design, LCC and other issues
Jackson (1988) has developed a RAMCAD methodology, which consists of interfacing
reliability, maintainability and supportability (RMS) computerized analysis with
computer-aided design. Lappin (1988) has developed a supportability evaluation
prediction process. Daugherty (1989) has described the total program cost benefits of
allowing life cycle cost sensitivity analysis to derive the conceptual design
development, and how the user can more effectively motivate the contractor to
optimize his design for supportability and affordability. Mortin (1990) has presented
supportability analysis of army’s mobile subscriber equipment (MSE) which
determines the additional procurement of specific spare parts could greatly increase
MSE performance. Graham and Doempke (1990) addressed the concept,
implementation, and long-range goals of a supportability trend analysis and
reporting system (STAR) for the National Space Transportation System (NSTS).
Klement and Dawson (1990) have presented a lesson learnt from the general dynamics
of RAM in computer-aided design. Bordelon (1991) has integrated the RMS into
conceptual and preliminary weapon system design phase. Stracener and Breneman
(1991) have presented RMS initiatives those contributing to the competitive edge.
Sherrieb and Stracener (1991) have presented R&M issue in conceptual aircraft design.
Dacko et al. (1991) have presented an engineering information system for
computer-aided acquisition and logistic support (CALS). Wing et al. (1991) have
investigated the effect of redundancy on logistic parameters. Brennan and Strcener
(1992) have presented a practical application of cost effectiveness analysis techniques
through the definition and solution of representative design tradeoff study using cost
effectiveness as a figure of merit for quality.
Knezevic (1995) has addressed the problem of maintenance resources selection,
spare parts in particular, for non-supported missions. Smith and Knezevic (1996a, b)
has discussed that how one can achieve quality through supportability and also
presented a mathematical model for spare parts and capital investment equipment
requirement. Sears et al. (1996) have discussed the problems with traditional
methodology of supportability and presented a fresh approach to supportability
engineering. Kumar and Knezevic (1997) have presented a spare optimization model for
series and parallel structures. Van Baaren and Smit (1998) have presented a framework
to develop and implement the RAMS and LCC aspect in the design and development
process of large-scale, complex technical system. Van Baaren and Smit (1999) have
developed a model (SMARD model) for incorporation of RAMS and LCC in the design
phase of technical system. Goffin (2000) have discussed the significance of evaluating
the support requirement at the design stage by using design for supportability
techniques. Golenko-Ginzburg et al. (2000) have developed a resource supportability
simulation model for man-machine production system. Van Baaren and Smit (2000)
have discussed that; to successfully develop integrated products, within an
interdisciplinary, life cycle oriented system-engineering approach, it is paramount to
include all engineering disciplines. Markeset and Kumar (2003) have presented an
approach for design and development of product support and maintenance needs for
industrial systems in a multinational environment. Markeset and Kumar (2003) have
presented an approach for integration of RAMS and risk analysis in the design,
development and manufacturing of a product. Martorell et al. (2004) have discussed the
roll of technical specification and maintenance (TSM) activities at nuclear power plants
(NPP), which aimed to increase RAM of Safety-Related Equipments, which, in turn,
must yield to an improved level of plant safety. Markeset and Kumar (2004) have
examined issues related to dimensioning of product support for advanced industrial
products. The focus is mainly on investigating engineering factors/parameters that
influence product support.
2.4 Simulation or modeling for RAMS
Raze et al. (1988) have emphasized the need for improved design technique that can be
implemented in the development of potential weapon systems. Dyer (1989) has
presented a unification of reliability, availability and repairability models for Markov
systems. Wing and Crow (1990) have developed a model for mean time to repair and
mean logistic delay time at the system level. Price (1994) has developed a methodology
and model for The United States Army Communications-Electronics Command
(CECOM) for achieving a system operational availability requirement optimally.
Jacobson and Arora (1995) proposed a general approach for calculating the
instantaneous availability, which is applicable to system or subsystem, which are
assumed to be returned to approximately their original state upon the completion of
repair. Hurst (1995) discussed on a steady state operational availability model, which
can be used to assist the Canadian Air Force in its aircraft fleet management
requirements. Rotab and Zohrul (1995) have presented an availability simulation for an
ammonia plant; in this work field data on failure and down time has been collected and
analyzed by fitting Wiebull distributions.
Malhotra (1996) proposed a hybrid approach for numerical transient solution of
Markov availability models. Edson and Hansen (1996) developed a software RAM
engineering system to aid in management and implementation of a post deployment
support process for computer software. Hwang (1996) has developed a general design
and performance evaluation model for the system designers in the initial design phase
of the integrated manufacturing system based on RAM and LCC. Varvarigou and
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Ahuja (1997) have provided a realistic reliability model for complex services. Johnson
and Johnson (1997) have presented a dynamic analytic solution for a 2N state General
Availability Model with N components having constant failure and repair rates.
Bowles and Dobbins (1998) have presented their practical experience in availability
modeling and analysis on high availability transaction processing.
Hecht (2001) described the use of standard reliability modeling techniques –
Markov modeling and reliability block diagrams to analyze a web site and develop the
answers to strategic questions on the configuration and operation of high availability
computing systems. Murphy et al. (2001) have provided RAM analysts with practical
rules of thumb that facilitate the resolution of how long and how many trials are
appropriate for simulations that focus on particular RAM parameters. Yang and
Nachlas (2001) have presented bivariate reliability and availability modeling. Oliveto
(2001) have presented an optimal sparing model for the operational availability to
approach the inherent availability. Brall and Gardner (2002) have presented the
modeling of availability including the effects of process failures and system capacity.
Hou and Okogbaa (2002) proposed a simplified availability modeling worksheet
(SAMOW), a computational tool that incorporates Markov analysis and reliability
block diagram methodologies to model and analyze the availability of a typical
end-to-end solution consisting of multiple complex component systems, where the
failure of each component system is attributed to software failures and hardware
failures. Lai et al. (2002) have developed Markov model and equations for distributed
software/hardware systems to obtain the steady-state availability. Bazargan and
McGrath (2003) presented their study on a flight school where overall system
availability at the operational level has been a chronic problem. Cassady et al. (2005)
have presented a generic model of equipment availability under imperfect
maintenance. Rajpal et al. (2006) explored the application of artificial neural
networks to model the behavior of a complex, repairable system. A composite measure
of RAM parameters has been proposed for measuring the systems performance.
2.5 Books for RAMS
Besides the above research paper there are various books and handbooks
(Ramakumar, 1993; Aggarwal, 1993; Krishnamoorthi, 1992; O’Connor, 1988;
Ushakov, 1994; Modarres, 1993; Barlow et al., 1993; Villemeur, 1993; Knezevic, 1995;
Misra, 1992; Zacks, 1992; Krishnaiah and Rao, 1988; Kececioglu, 1993; Nelson, 1982;
Blanchard et al., 1995; Smith, 1993; Holmberg and Folkeson, 1991; Reiche, 1994; Pecht,
1995) are also found on RAMS. These books explain about the basics of RAMS and
their analysis, modeling assessment, etc.
3. Conclusion
Though a variety of work has been done, specifically on reliability maintainability,
availability individual or two of them but less work have been found on supportability
and very less work has been found on all four aspects of RAMS. Though some people
have worked on RAM, they have not considered the supportability aspect. Whatever
work exists on RAMS is either on some specific case or on some specific industry like
defense or aerospace industry and no body has used the current information
technology like internet in connection with it. Therefore use of information technology
can make RAMS more effective and can be used for other systems or industry also.
An efficient RAMS engineering is dependent on planned and systematic effort. The
RAMS philosophy should include how RAMS should organize and how it should be
integrated in the manufacturing industry or service industry. It must also clarify the
routine to be followed in RAMS and documentation to be produced. The RAMS
philosophy should conclude with objectives that are to be achieved through RAMS.
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Further reading
Markeset, T. and Kumar, U. (2003), “Integration of RAMS and risk analysis in product design
and development work processes”, Journal of Quality in Maintenance Engineering, Vol. 9
No. 4, pp. 393-410.
Knezevic, J. (1993), Reliability, Maintainability and Supportability: A Probabilistic Approach,
McGraw-Hill Book Company Europe, Maidenhead.
Corresponding author
S. Saraswat can be contacted at: suvandan@ realiffmail.com
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