Engineering Index: An Engineering Certification/Qualification Metric

Inherent in most engineered products is some measure of margin defined as the amount a product exceeds the limits of its nominal performance requirements. Understanding margin, and its associated uncertainties, is essential to product assessment, qualification, and certification. The Engineering Ind...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Military operations research (Alexandria, Va.) Va.), 2006-01, Vol.11 (2), p.27-44
Main Authors: Booker, Jane M., Ross, Timothy, Hamada, Michael, Reardon, Brian, Dolin, Ron, Faust, Cheryll L., Najera, Lorenzo
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Design engineering
Estimate reliability
Industrial design
Manufacturing engineering
Military engineering
Military operations
Operations research
Process capability
Product design
Product performance
Citations: Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Inherent in most engineered products is some measure of margin defined as the amount a product exceeds the limits of its nominal performance requirements. Understanding margin, and its associated uncertainties, is essential to product assessment, qualification, and certification. The Engineering Index (EI) is a metric for assessing how much a product exceeds its performance requirements. The knowledge necessary to assess margin is equivalent to that required for reliability estimates; however, reliability does not always provide a complete indicator of the current and/or future state of a system because it represents the likelihood of failure and not condition. Therefore, reliability does not indicate how or when a specific product will degrade to an unacceptable state, i.e. to a state at or below its performance limit. Traditional metrics are useful to address the reliability of a population, but they are not typically employed to estimate the proximity of a product to its performance limits. Moreover, the applications developed here require a metric to provide a warning of when a specific product's reliability might fall below unity. Such a metric is the EI The EI supports certification, qualification and planning endeavors, not only by assessing the current state, but also by inferring or predicting how a system potentially changes over time relative to requirements. The EI allows decision makers to plan for and possibly mitigate problems in advance of a crisis, by estimating how changes impact a system's functional performance. We provide an example to illustrate the usefulness of this new metric and the uncertainty methodology linked to it.
ISSN:1082-5983
2163-2758
DOI:10.5711/morj.11.2.27