Analysis Quality Index - What confidence do you have in your risk analysis?

OEMs and operators of complex mission/safety critical systems are faced with the requirement to mitigate design and performance risks and their economic consequences. A key issue for any engineering organization is the integrity of the analysis that is used to support significant commercial decisions. Analysis outputs used to establish or validate performance criteria should have an appropriately high level of confidence associated with them when entering into significant financial contracts. While risk assessment methods and techniques for analysis are well defined and understood and are captured in various international military and commercial standards, the issue of analysis quality has traditionally been neglected and is not adequately covered in most commercially available engineering analysis tools. The quality of data inputs determines the quality of analysis outputs. A key factor is the source of the parameters used in an analysis. For example input data may be sourced from operational data, or may be based on the engineering judgement of an individual or a third party organization. This paper outlines an approach to analysis quality assessment in a model based engineering environment, focusing on the sources of data and ancillary information to generate an Analysis Quality Index (AQI) for the analysis. The AQI is generated as a dashboard reporting function for the engineering model that is used to provide a confidence rating on the analysis outputs. Analysis Quality Index capability was incorporated into Maintenance Aware Design environment (MADe) software, an integrated tool-set that combines engineering risk analysis capabilities to support systems engineering, design and through-life support.