What is Reliability Block Diagram Analysis (RBD Analysis)?
A Reliability Block Diagram (RBD) is a graphical representation of the components of the system and how they are reliability-wise related. The diagram represents the functioning state (i.e. success or failure) of the system in terms of the functioning states of its components. For example, a simple series configuration indicates that all of the components must operate for the system to operate, a simple parallel configuration indicates that at least one of the components must operate, and so on. When you define the reliability characteristics of each component, you can use software to calculate the reliability function for the entire system and obtain a wide variety of system reliability analysis results, including the ability to identify critical components and calculate the optimum reliability allocation strategy to meet a system reliability goal. Likewise, when you also define the maintainability characteristics of the components in the RBD, you can use software to simulate the oper
