Exceeding Customer Expectations through Accelerated Reliability Testing

September 28 – 30, 2016

Hilton, Pensacola Beach Florida

The 2016 Accelerated Stress Testing and Reliability (ASTR) Conference is focused on highlighting cutting-edge methods to deliver maximum cost-benefits from accelerated reliability testing. ASTR 2016 is relevant to product development, test and manufacturers involved in the aerospace, automotive, consumer electronics, defense, medical, telecommunications and other cutting edge industries where reliability is a key driver of operational and business success. If your company needs to improve accelerated product testing, improve field reliability, reduce warranty costs, improve profits, gain market share, and become more competitive, then the 2016 ASTR Conference can help you. Participate in the practical papers, attend tutorials, talk to equipment exhibitors and learn proven methods. ASTR 2016 will present detailed case studies, best practices, lessons learned, and clear insight on how to best apply and integrate accelerated testing tools and methods.

CALL FOR PRESENTATIONS

Presentation abstracts are invited now with a 150 words summary due by March 15. Paper selection announcements by April 15 with draft paper and presentation due by May 15 and finals due July 15. The 2016 focus will include:

• The science of test acceleration: integration of design modeling, analysis and accelerated testing
• Leveraging testing when total system failure is not an option: assuring product-life from degradation test approaches
• Focusing and streamlining test effort: achieving better results with less effort
• Discover ways to better understand vibration testing

Complete submission details are available at www.ieee-astr.org. Presenters selected will follow a strict time line for papers and receive discounted registration.

Become part of this active, growing conference sponsored by both the ASQ-Reliability Division and the IEEE- Reliability Society. The hotel has special rates for this conference of $159 a night.

There are many reasons to attend this conference! Make this your Fall destination:

• Visit a local technology company
• Visit Eglin AFB nearby
• See the Naval Aviation Museum nearby
• Visit the Air Force Research Lab
• See the National Flight Academy
• Catch the Blue Angels
• Visit Historic Fort Pickens
• Enjoy the Pensacola Sea Food Festival Sept. 30

General ASTR conference contact: Jim McLinn at jmrel2@aol.com

For Program related questions: Marc Banghart at marc@asqrd.org

Congratulations to Amanda Gillespie, Mark Monaghan, and Yuan Chen. Their paper, “Comparison Modeling of System Reliability for Future NASA Projects,” won the award for the best paper by an ASQ Reliability Division member at the 2012 Reliability and Maintainability Symposium in January. Gillespie and Monaghan are a Reliability Engineers with SAIC at NASA Kennedy Space Center in Florida; Chen is a senior member of technical staff with the Electronic Systems Branch, NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. The paper presented a methodology combining reliability block diagram analysis, cut set analysis, comparison modeling, and Fussell-Vesely importance measures to better understand and compare the vulnerabilities of future NASA launch vehicle architectures under possible application scenarios. This approach allowed the design team to address the deficiencies in the design architectures more efficiently, while balancing the need to design for optimum weight and space allocations. The paper was presented at RAMS by Amanda Gillespie. The award, which will be presented annually, was initiated last year by the RD Executive committee to recognize the contributions of RD members to RAMS and to encourage more RD members to submit papers to RAMS. The selection committee, appointed by the executive committee, reviewed all of the papers submitted to RAMS by ASQ-RD members, selected five finalist papers, attended the presentations of those papers at RAMS, and selected the winner based on both the content and quality of the written text and the presentation. John Bowles, chair of the selection committee said “We were pleased with the quality of the papers submitted and look forward to having even more next year.” The award has two parts: a $500 honorarium distributed to the winners and a plaque to be presented at the ASQ-RD dinner at the 2013 RAMS.

tolerant systems subject to imperfect fault coverage and resource constraints. Amari said the system model is flexible and can accurately model a wide range of fault-tolerant systems used in safety critical applications. It assumes the system consists of several subsystems in series and each subsystem contains multiple redundant components. Integer programming is used to select the optimal design configuration, types of components, and types of fault tolerant mechanisms from the available choices.

The ASQ RAMS Best Paper award is presented annually to recognize significant contributions of RD members to RAMS and to encourage more RD members to submit papers to RAMS. The selection committee, appointed by the RD executive committee, reviewed all of the papers submitted to RAMS by ASQ-RD members to select the winner. John Bowles, chair of the selection committee said “We were pleased to have many high quality papers submitted by RD members this year. We anticipate having even more next year.” The award has two parts: a $500 honorarium distributed to the winners and a plaque that will be presented to the winners at the ASQ-RD dinner at the 2014 RAMS.

Mathias Botzler, Peter Zeiler, and Bernd Bertsche, all of the Institute of Machine Components at the University of Stuttgart, Germany won the award for the best paper by an ASQ Reliability Division member at the 2014 Reliability and Maintainability Symposium.

Their paper, “Failure Prediction By Means Of Advanced Usage Data Analysis”, presents an innovative, 2-step procedure for analyzing observed field reliability data in order to improve maintenance procedures for capital goods. The first step is based on physical knowledge of the equipment and is used to condense the large amount of data that is typically collected from the electronic control units in such equipment to facilitate further analysis. The second step is applied to the pre-condensed data to incorporate unknown effects and degradation mechanisms into the analysis. The methods are then combined to yield a sharper image of the observed field reliability, increase the reliability knowledge of the product, and enable innovative and more economical maintenance policies.