In today’s world we need reliable, sustainable and effective approaches to develop products to satisfy people’s needs and wants. For years, the goal of reliability engineering has been to create products that meet the optimal standard of quality; however, technical solutions are increasingly moving towards IoT-based systems, which are associated with a large number of new critical failure modes.
To face these critical failure modes, new methods and solutions for reliability assurance are required. Dr. Martin Dazer is currently busy exploring these possibilities. Dr. Dazer is Head of the Reliability Engineering Department at the Institute of Machine Components (IMA), lecturer at University of Stuttgart and consultant in the field of reliability technology. He is also a keynote speaker during Holland Innovative’s Reliability Seminar to be held on October 14, 2021 at High Tech Campus, Eindhoven.
New approaches in product development
Accroding to Dr. Dazer it is important to use the full potential of the available data for sustainable and efficient product development and to enable safe and reliable operation of intelligent systems. Conventional preventive methods of reliability engineering are no longer sufficient for this challenge. Therefore, a paradigm shift in reliability engineering is necessary – from a conservative component design using high safety factors in combination with purely functional assurance, to a sustainable product development with reduced safety factors, combined with new approaches for reliability assurance. The role of data and machine learning methods in these approaches is shown by current research and industrial projects.
Oversizing is not the solution
Many times what you see in product development is oversizing. It means, for example, that reliability engineers have made products that last much longer than the expected lifetime. This might seem at first as a success; however, creating an oversized product is as bad as an unreliable product. Oversizing often employs extra resources that can lead to an increase in waste, recycling and pollution, not to mention increasing cost and time spent.
Data science since the beginning stages
Collecting and using data during the design and development of a product can solve lots of these issues. It leads to more sustainable solutions that meet the quality mark while avoiding oversizing. These approaches are new in this field, and it’s important for reliability engineers to unlock the full potential data can bring to the product development process.
Creating the “aha” moment
Dr. Dazer hopes that during the seminar, people will get new insights about reliability engineering. “We need new approaches, design thinking and data to get new solutions. We show in research that we can increase lifetime and reliability and decrease global warming”. Showing real use cases will create the “aha” moment that will inspire the audience about the possibilities data science can bring to this field.
For more information about the Seminar on the 14th of October click here.