RAMS 2022 Conference Proceedings now available for SRE Ottawa members

One of the major perks of membership with SRE Ottawa is the access to trove of reliability resources. We have recorded webinars from our monthly meetings and our newsletters spreading the recent advancements in the field.

Now, we have made the papers and tutorials from RAMS 2022 Conference available to our members. RAMS is a preeminent conference in Reliability Engineering conducted by a consortium of organizations including Society of Reliability Engineers (SRE). The papers discuss and share the cutting-edge research from the field of Reliability & Availability management.

Become a member of SRE Ottawa now to get immediate access to these resources. Check out the membership page for instructions to join or contact us directly.

Highlighting the Electronic Supply Chain Issues

SRE Ottawa was pleased to host Titu Botos, CEO of NeuronicWorks Inc., North York, Ontario, Canada for a presentation titled "Electronic component shortages and the domino effect on product development" during out monthly meeting#338.

Titu gave the audience a rare insight into the complex logistic network that underpins the modern electronics industry. With the prevalence of electronics being used in all products for control systems and smart usage, the global demand is high. This has led to electronic foundries, chip manufacturers, and assemblers to scale up and establish network of various magnitude.

Because of the interconnectedness of this network, a single external impact like the pandemic or shipping mishap can have a domino effect that will be felt by all. Titu showed a detailed view of this impact and its severity for design engineers in the electronic industry.

To view a recorded presentation of this topic, contact us or join SRE Ottawa.

Data-Driven Study of Mass Transit Maintenance

SRE Ottawa recently conducted its event#337 on February 23, 2022. During the meeting, we had the pleasure to welcome Regis Alencar, Senior Reliability Engineer, Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) who spoke on the topic of "Reliability & Maintainability Strategies for Repairable Systems in a Mass Transit Rolling Stock Subway".

Regis' talk pertained to the different maintenance strategies applicable to a repairable system and it summarized the results of an internal study that was conducted in TTC. Mass Transit Systems are complex electro-mechanical systems and having an optimized maintenance strategy to repair/replace components will save the organization millions. There are also other prime reasons to think about the maintenance of these systems: Safety and Customer Satisfaction. If a subway car has a failure inside a tunnel, then the resulting safety hazard is very risky and litigious. Many a number of people can relate to the displeasure of a delayed bus during the morning commute. In order to avoid these kinds of incidents, the Maintenance personnel and Reliability Engineers at the organization will have to develop a maintenance strategy.

A common framework used in developing maintenance strategy is the Reliability-Centered Maintenance (RCM). Originally conceived to be used in aircraft maintenance, the framework defines 6 different types of component failure patterns in a system. The Failure Rate of a component is dependent on its design, usage, and conditions. It can increase or decrease or stay constant over time. RCM's original paper conducted a field study using the maintenance records of aircraft and published the ratio of components exhibiting each of the 6 failure patterns. The result was about ~89% of the failures exhibited non-age-related patterns. Since this study was on aircraft components under defined conditions, one cannot use this result to develop a maintenance plan. Regis spearheaded the TTC study to determine if TTC's own data support the original RCM study. TTC was blessed with a data structure within the organization that had decades of maintenance records which enabled them to analyze the data. The result of that study was shared at this presentation with engaging discussions.

To view a recording of this webinar, and enjoy other webinars, join SRE Ottawa through our membership.