Abstract
The objectives of reliability design evaluation are discussed. The application of fault tree analysis as a design-evaluation technique is described with reference to a communications receiver system. A criticality analysis is performed on the system, and, arising from this, it is shown that more usual methods of evaluating system reliability are inadequate to describe the reliability of systems which can suffer different forms of performance degradation. A reliability figure of merit is derived which takes account of the severity of various forms of performance degradation, and this is used to compare the reliability of alternative design configurations.
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