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Active Redundancy
Active redundancy is a design concept that increases operational availability and that reduces operating cost by automating most critical maintenance actions. This concept is related to condition-based maintenance and fault reporting. History The initial requirement began with military combat systems during World War I. The approach used for survivability was to install thick armor plate to resist gun fire and install multiple guns. This became unaffordable and impractical during the Cold War when aircraft and missile systems became common. The new approach was to build distributed systems that continue to work when components are damaged. This depends upon very crude forms of artificial intelligence that perform reconfiguration by obeying specific rules. An example of this approach is the AN/UYK-43 computer. Formal design philosophies involving active redundancy are required for critical systems where corrective labor is undesirable or impractical to correct failure during no ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Operational Availability
Operational availability in systems engineering is a measurement of how long a system has been available to use when compared with how long it should have been available to be used. Definition Operational availability is a management concept that evaluates the following. * Diagnostic down time * Criticality * Fault isolation down time * Logistics delay down time * Corrective maintenance down time Any failed item that is not corrected will induce operational failure. A_o is used to evaluate that risk. Operational failure is unacceptable in any situation where the following can occur. * Capital equipment loss * Injury or loss of life * Sustained failure to accomplish mission In military acquisition, operational availability is used as one of the Key Performance Parameters in requirements documents, to form the basis for decision support analyses. History Aircraft systems, ship systems, missile systems, and space systems have a large number of failure modes that must be addressed w ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Operating Cost
Operating costs or operational costs, are the expenses which are related to the operation of a business, or to the operation of a device, component, piece of equipment or facility. They are the cost of resources used by an organization just to maintain its existence. Business operating costs For a commercial enterprise, operating costs fall into three broad categories: * Fixed costs, which are the same whether the operation is closed or running at 100% capacity. Fixed costs include items such as the rent of the building. These generally have to be paid regardless of what state the business is in. * Variable costs, which may increase depending on whether more production is done, and how it is done (producing 100 items of product might require 10 days of normal time or take 7 days if overtime is used. It may be more or less expensive to use overtime production depending on whether faster production means the product can be more profitable). Variable costs include indirect overh ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Condition-based Maintenance
Predictive maintenance techniques are designed to help determine the condition of in-service equipment in order to estimate when maintenance should be performed. This approach claims more cost savings over routine or time-based preventive maintenance, because tasks are performed only when warranted. Thus, it is regarded as condition-based maintenance carried out as suggested by estimations of the degradation state of an item. The main appeal of predictive maintenance is to allow convenient scheduling of corrective maintenance, and to prevent unexpected equipment failures. By taking into account measurements of the state of the equipment, maintenance work can be better planned (spare parts, people, etc.) and what would have been "unplanned stops" are transformed to shorter and fewer "planned stops", thus increasing plant availability. Other potential advantages include increased equipment lifetime, increased plant safety, fewer accidents with negative impact on environment, and o ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Fault Reporting
Fault reporting is a maintenance concept that increases operational availability and that reduces operating cost by three mechanisms: * Reduce labor-intensive diagnostic evaluation * Eliminate diagnostic testing down-time * Provide notification to management for degraded operation That is a prerequisite for condition-based maintenance. Active redundancy can be integrated with fault reporting to reduce the down time to a few minutes per year. History Formal maintenance philosophies are required by organizations whose primary responsibility is to ensure systems are ready when expected, such as space agencies and military. Labor-intensive planned maintenance began during the rise of the Industrial Revolution and depends upon periodic diagnostic evaluation based upon calendar dates, distance, or use. The intent is to accomplish diagnostic evaluations that indicate when maintenance is required to prevent inconvenience and safety issues that will occur when critical equipment fai ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
AN/UYK-43
The AN/UYK-43 was the standard 32-bit computer of the United States Navy for surface ship and submarine platforms, with the first unit delivered in October, 1984. Some 1,250 units were delivered through to 2000. The size of a refrigerator, it replaced the older AN/UYK-7, both built by UNISYS and shared the same instruction set. An enhancement to the UYK-43, the Open Systems Module (OSM), allows up to six VMEbus Type 6U commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) cards to be installed in a UYK-43 enclosure. In accordance with the Joint Electronics Type Designation System (JETDS), the "''AN/UYK-43''" designation represents the 43rd design of an Army-Navy electronic device for general utility data processing computing equipment. The JETDS system also now is used to name all Department of Defense electronic systems. The UYK-43 is being replaced by commercial off-the-shelf systems. Retired systems are being cannibalized for repair parts to support systems still in use by U.S. and non-U.S. forces. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence (AI) is the capability of computer, computational systems to perform tasks typically associated with human intelligence, such as learning, reasoning, problem-solving, perception, and decision-making. It is a field of research in computer science that develops and studies methods and software that enable machines to machine perception, perceive their environment and use machine learning, learning and intelligence to take actions that maximize their chances of achieving defined goals. High-profile applications of AI include advanced web search engines (e.g., Google Search); recommendation systems (used by YouTube, Amazon (company), Amazon, and Netflix); virtual assistants (e.g., Google Assistant, Siri, and Amazon Alexa, Alexa); autonomous vehicles (e.g., Waymo); Generative artificial intelligence, generative and Computational creativity, creative tools (e.g., ChatGPT and AI art); and Superintelligence, superhuman play and analysis in strategy games (e.g., ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Operational Availability
Operational availability in systems engineering is a measurement of how long a system has been available to use when compared with how long it should have been available to be used. Definition Operational availability is a management concept that evaluates the following. * Diagnostic down time * Criticality * Fault isolation down time * Logistics delay down time * Corrective maintenance down time Any failed item that is not corrected will induce operational failure. A_o is used to evaluate that risk. Operational failure is unacceptable in any situation where the following can occur. * Capital equipment loss * Injury or loss of life * Sustained failure to accomplish mission In military acquisition, operational availability is used as one of the Key Performance Parameters in requirements documents, to form the basis for decision support analyses. History Aircraft systems, ship systems, missile systems, and space systems have a large number of failure modes that must be addressed w ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Fault Reporting
Fault reporting is a maintenance concept that increases operational availability and that reduces operating cost by three mechanisms: * Reduce labor-intensive diagnostic evaluation * Eliminate diagnostic testing down-time * Provide notification to management for degraded operation That is a prerequisite for condition-based maintenance. Active redundancy can be integrated with fault reporting to reduce the down time to a few minutes per year. History Formal maintenance philosophies are required by organizations whose primary responsibility is to ensure systems are ready when expected, such as space agencies and military. Labor-intensive planned maintenance began during the rise of the Industrial Revolution and depends upon periodic diagnostic evaluation based upon calendar dates, distance, or use. The intent is to accomplish diagnostic evaluations that indicate when maintenance is required to prevent inconvenience and safety issues that will occur when critical equipment fai ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Data Center Tiers
Data center tiers are defined levels of resiliency and redundancy for IT facility infrastructure. They are widely used in the data center, ISP and cloud computing industries as part of the engineering design for high availability systems. The data center tier system was created by the Uptime Institute. The standard data center tiers are: * Tier I: no redundancy * Tier II: partial N+1 redundancy * Tier III: full N+1 redundancy of all systems, including power supply and cooling distribution paths * Tier IV: as Tier III, but with 2N+1 redundancy of all systems A Tier III system is intended to operate at Tier II resiliency even when under maintenance, and a Tier IV system is intended to operate at Tier III resiliency even when under maintenance. Most commercial data centers are Tier III; instead of using Tier IV datacentres, many large service providers typically use multiple availability zones to implement of their services, thus achieving greater resilience than would be possible ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Availability Zone
In cloud computing, an availability zone is a subset of an IT infrastructure system that shares no service-critical components (including power, cooling and access) with any other availability zone. Availability zones are typically geographically separated from one another, to prevent local disasters from acting on more than one availability zone. Some service providers also make higher-level regional distinctions between availability zones, allowing service providers to mitigate even regional-level disasters such as earthquakes and forest fires. Applications requiring high availability are typically implemented as distributed systems that span multiple availability zones. Services offering distinct availability zones include Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. See also * Single point of failure A single point of failure (SPOF) is a part of a system that would Cascading failure, stop the entire system from working if it were to fail. The term single poi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Maintenance
The technical meaning of maintenance involves functional checks, servicing, repairing or replacing of necessary devices, equipment, machinery, building infrastructure and supporting utilities in industrial, business, and residential installations. Terms such as "predictive" or "planned" maintenance describe various cost-effective practices aimed at keeping equipment operational; these activities occur either before or after a potential failure. Definitions Maintenance functions can be defined as maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO), and MRO is also used for maintenance, repair and operations. Over time, the terminology of maintenance and MRO has begun to become standardized. The United States Department of Defense uses the following definitions: Federal Standard 1037C and from MIL-STD-188 and from the Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms * Any activity—such as tests, measurements, replacements, adjustments, and repairs—intended to retain ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Engineering Concepts
Engineering is the practice of using natural science, mathematics, and the engineering design process to solve problems within technology, increase efficiency and productivity, and improve systems. Modern engineering comprises many subfields which include designing and improving infrastructure, machinery, vehicles, electronics, materials, and energy systems. The discipline of engineering encompasses a broad range of more specialized fields of engineering, each with a more specific emphasis for applications of mathematics and science. See glossary of engineering. The word ''engineering'' is derived from the Latin . Definition The American Engineers' Council for Professional Development (the predecessor of the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology aka ABET) has defined "engineering" as: History Engineering has existed since ancient times, when humans devised inventions such as the wedge, lever, wheel and pulley, etc. The term ''engineering'' is derived ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
