REPUBLIC OF SERBIA

MINISTRY OF DEFENCE

www.mod.gov.rs

MINISTRY OF DEFENCE

Material Resources Sector

Defensive Technologies Department

Military Technical Institute

www.vti.mod.gov.rs

problems of RELIABILITY predicTION of electronic equipment

SLAVKO POKORNI

Information Technology School, Belgrade, slavko.pokorni@its.edu.rs

Abstract: Military handbook for the reliability prediction of electronic equipment MIL-HDBK-217 is still used by more than 80% of engineers. But, in spite of that MIL-HDBK-217 was updated several times to keep pace with technology advancement as well as the changes in prediction procedure, it has limitations. Beside that, problems in setting requirements for reliability were encountered in practice. The both lead to differences between the calculated reliability and actual reliability in use. The limitations of MIL-HDBK-217 and efforts to revise it are presented in this paper. The problems to establish good reliability requirements in connection with the statistics of causes of failures, which shows that big percentage of failures are non-hardvare failures and a way how to establish a good contractual reliability requirements, are also presented.

Keywords: reliability, reliability calculation, MIL-HDBK-217, hardware, software, human, reliability requirements