Reliability, February 2016 Big Data for Reliability Engineering: Threat and Opportunity Vitali Volovoi Independent Consultant
[email protected] more recently, analytics). It shares with the rest of the fields Abstract - The confluence of several technologies promises under this umbrella the need to abstract away most stormy waters ahead for reliability engineering. News reports domain-specific information, and to use tools that are mainly are full of buzzwords relevant to the future of the field—Big domain-independent1. As a result, it increasingly shares the Data, the Internet of Things, predictive and prescriptive lingua franca of modern systems engineering—probability and analytics—the sexier sisters of reliability engineering, both statistics that are required to balance the otherwise orderly and exciting and threatening. Can we reliability engineers join the deterministic engineering world. party and suddenly become popular (and better paid), or are And yet, reliability engineering does not wear the fancy we at risk of being superseded and driven into obsolescence? clothes of its sisters. There is nothing privileged about it. It is This article argues that“big-picture” thinking, which is at the rarely studied in engineering schools, and it is definitely not core of the concept of the System of Systems, is key for a studied in business schools! Instead, it is perceived as a bright future for reliability engineering. necessary evil (especially if the reliability issues in question are safety-related). The community of reliability engineers Keywords - System of Systems, complex systems, Big Data, consists of engineers from other fields who were mainly Internet of Things, industrial internet, predictive analytics, trained on the job (instead of receiving formal degrees in the prescriptive analytics field).