Generic approach for deriving reliability and maintenance requirements through consideration of in-context customer objectives

Not all implementations of reliability are equally effective at providing customer and user benefit. Random system failure with no prior warning or failure accommodation will have an immediate, usually adverse impact on operation. Nevertheless, this approach to reliability, implicit in measurements such as failure rate and mean time between failures, is widely assumed without consideration of potential benefits of proactive maintenance. Similarly, it is easy to assume that improved maintainability is always a good thing. However, maintainability is only one option available to reduce the cost of ownership and reduce the impact of failure. This paper discusses a process for deriving optimized reliability and maintenance requirements through consideration of in-context customer objectives rather than a product in isolation.