Handbook of Reliability, Availability, Maintainability and Safety in Engineering Design - Part 24 studies the combination of various methods of designing for reliability, availability, maintainability and safety, as well as the latest techniques in probability and possibility modelling, mathematical algorithmic modelling, evolutionary algorithmic modelling, symbolic logic modelling, artificial intelligence modelling, and object-oriented computer modelling, in a logically structured approach to determining the integrity of engineering design. . | Analytic Development of Reliability and Performance in Engineering Design 213 Fig. Revised Weibull chart 214 3 Reliability and Performance in Engineering Design ment of the characteristics of failure. A major problem arises though when the measures and or estimates of the Weibull parameters cannot be based on obtained data and engineering design analysis cannot be quantitative. Credible and statistically acceptable qualitative methodologies to determine the integrity of engineering design in the case where data are not available or not meaningful are included amongst others in the concept of information integration technology IIT . IIT is a combination of techniques methods and tools for collecting organising analysing and utilising diverse information to guide optimal decision-making. The method know as performance and reliability evaluation with diverse information combination and tracking PREDICT is a highly successful example Booker et al. 2000 of IIT that has been applied in automotive system design and development and in nuclear weapons storage. Specifically IIT is a formal multidisciplinary approach to evaluating the performance and reliability of engineering processes when data are sparse or non-existent. This is particularly useful when complex integrations of systems and their interactions make it difficult and even impossible to gather meaningful statistical data that could allow for a quantitative estimation of the performance parameters of probability distributions such as the Weibull distribution. The objective is to evaluate equipment reliability early in the detail design phase by making effective use of all available information expert knowledge historical information experience with similar processes and computer models. Much of this information especially expert knowledge is not formally included in performance or reliability calculations of engineering designs because it is often implicit undocumented or not quantitative. The intention
