The future of military standards. A focus on electronics

The growing perception that with cutbacks in the military and the changing international economic environment, the military must rely on commercial industries in order to afford the next generation of high-performance and high-reliability military systems is discussed. One issue associated with the question of whether an industrial base for the military can be provided and maintained without major changes in the operation of both the government and commercial industry is examined, namely, whether commercial standards can effectively supplant military standards and still provide high performance and reliability for military missions     

Evaluation of built-in test

Built-in test (BIT) provides fault finding as a means to aid in system assembly, test, and maintenance. An investigation to evaluate BIT of a particular electronics board used in the in-flight entertainment system for Boeing 777s is described. We found BIT proved useful when failure occurrences were uniquely associated with the operating environment, situations which can result in no-fault found, or could-not duplicate (CND) failures upon test. We also observed cases where the BIT failed to observe failures, and in some cases pointed to the wrong cause of failure. These and other advantages and disadvantages of BIT implementation are discussed     

An assessment of the Qualified Manufacturer List (QML)

The Qualified Manufacturer List (QML) approach, detailed in MIL-I-38535, General Specification for Integrated Circuits (Microcircuit) Manufacturing, embraces many of the commercial practices employed by high volume microcircuit suppliers. Nevertheless, with the availability of highly reliable and lower cost commercial parts, the QML approach becomes unnecessary and undesirable. In this paper we attempt to show why US government support of the QML program is leading the military and government to unaffordable access to out-dated technologies, damaging our country's military and avionics position. We will present information to show why we support the retraction of MIL-PRF-38535 and any other documents which imply that QML parts are superior to commercial parts, including those of QPL, MIL-STD-454, and MIL-HDBK-217 (now prohibited from use in all new Army programs)     

故障预测与健康管理(PHM)技术的现状与发展

 结合故障预测与健康管理(PHM)的技术发展过程,阐述了PHM的应用价值。论述了PHM技术系统级应用问题,提出了故障诊断与预测的人-机-环完整性认知模型,并依此对蓬勃发展的故障诊断与故障预测技术进行了分类与综合分析,给出了PHM技术的发展图像。针对故障诊断与预测的不确定性特征,对故障诊断与预测技术的性能要求、定量评价与验证方法进行了分析。最后,以PHM技术的工程应用为线索,提出了PHM技术发展中的几个问题。     

The realism of FAA reliability-safety requirements and alternatives

As avionic systems become more complex, realistic qualification requirements for the flight-critical systems becomes more important, but more difficult to define. Requirements developed to establish acceptable levels of performance must be verifiable if they are to have any meaning. This article shows that both the current FAA requirements of flight-critical systems and the FAA recommended methods for probabilistic assessment are flawed, and result in “required” safety assessments which are misleading. Alternatives are then explored