Integrative Qualitative Quality Assurance and Reliability Prediction over the Complete Product Design Cycle

In this paper the possibilities of a qualitative and systematic procedure for the selection of the most developable concept in early design stages and the transfer of the gained information into a failure mode and effects analysis are shown. Further, the possibility of deriving reasonable lifetime distributions from the FMEA assessment values for the description of the system behaviour is demonstrated. With this integrative qualitative approach new products can be accompanied with a procedure, which passes on all its information without any losses, over the complete product design cycle. Copyright (C) 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.