FMECA for C4ISR Facilities

1-5. History

The FMECA was originally developed by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to improve and verify the reliability of space program hardware. The cancelled MIL-STD-785B, entitled Reliability Program for System and Equipment Development and Production, Task 204, Failure Mode, Effects and Criticality Analysis calls out the procedures for performing a FMECA on equipment or systems. The cancelled MIL-STD-1629A is the military standard that establishes requirements and procedures for performing a FMECA, to evaluate and document, by failure mode analysis, the potential impact of each functional or hardware failure on mission success, personnel and system safety, maintainability and system performance. Each potential failure is ranked by the severity of its effect so that corrective actions may be taken to eliminate or control design risk. High risk items are those items whose failure would jeopardize the mission or endanger personnel. The techniques presented in this standard may be applied to any electrical or mechanical equipment or system. Although MIL-STD-1629A has been cancelled, its concepts should be applied during the development phases of all critical systems and equipment whether it is military, commercial or industrial systems/products.

1-6. FMECA benefits

The FMECA will: highlight single point failures requiring corrective action; aid in developing test methods and troubleshooting techniques; provide a foundation for qualitative reliability, maintainability, safety and logistics analyses; provide estimates of system critical failure rates; provide a quantitative ranking of system and/or subsystem failure modes relative to mission importance; and identify parts & systems most likely to fail.

a. Therefore, by developing a FMECA during the design phase of a facility, the overall costs will be minimized by identifying single point failures and other areas of concern prior to construction, or manufacturing. The FMECA will also provide a baseline or a tool for troubleshooting to be used for identifying corrective actions for a given failure. This information can then be used to perform various other analyses such as a Fault Tree Analysis or a Reliability-Centered Maintenance (RCM) analysis.
b. The Fault Tree Analysis is a tool used for identifying multiple point failures; more than one condition to take place in order for a particular failure to occur. This analysis is typically conducted on areas that would cripple the mission or cause a serious injury to personnel.
c. The RCM analysis is a process that is used to identify maintenance actions that will reduce the probability of failure at the least amount of cost. This includes utilizing monitoring equipment for predicting failure and for some equipment, allowing it to run to failure. This process relies on up to date operating performance data compiled from a computerized maintenance system. This data is then plugged into a FMECA to rank and identify the failure modes of concern.