A DSM based method for the ranking of system components w.r.t. system reliability and availability

Engineers need to asses and understand performance risks in the early design phase to ensure that products will meet customer requirements and will be delivered within time and within budget. This paper proposes a method for the ranking of system components with respect to reliability and availability of the complete system. A list of structured function specifications and a table with function weights are required as input. A Dependency Structure Matrix (DSM) is derived from the function specifications. The PageRank algorithm is used to rank the system components based on the derived DSM and the function weights. The results are projected on the DSM. The results clearly indicate which components, and in particular which component clusters in a system are most important with respect to reliability and availability.