System Reliability Center - R&M Library

Military Prepositioning: Army and Air Force Programs Need to Be Reassessed.

The U.S. military stores, or prepositions, reserves of military equipment and supplies near potential conflict areas to ensure that the material would be quickly available to forces in the event of a crisis. During a crisis, prepositioning would speed U.S. response times because only the troops and a relatively small amount of materiel would need to be brought by air to the conflict area. As a result, the Department of Defense (DOD) could field heavily equipped, combat-ready forces in days rather than the weeks it would take if the forces and all necessary equipment and supplies had to be brought from the United States. Collectively, the services spent over $1 billion in fiscal year 1997 to operate and maintain their prepositioning programs. The Chairman, Subcommittee on Readiness, Committee on Armed Services, U. S. Senate, asked GAO to assess the readiness of prepositioning programs. Specifically, GAO examined (1) the basis for program requirements and (2) the rates of inventory fill and maintenance condition of prepositioned stocks and the reliability of this readiness data. GAO focused its review on the Army and the Air Force programs because of concerns that emerged about the sufficiency, condition, and management of their prepositioned stocks. Information on the Marine Corps and the Navy programs is in appendix I.

Nayesian Aspects of Material Failure, Engineering Reliability, and Software Integrity.

Research on using Bayesian statistical methods and on probabilistic modeling of failure processes is described. Emphasis is on developing mathematical models for describing the growth of surface and penny shaped cracks in structural materials and on assessing the integrity of software via a new model for software. Initial work on a paradigm for information fusion is discussed and issues such as sensor reliability, sensor sabotage, adversarial sensors and sensor parleying are introduced.

A RELIABILITY REPORT ON LOW POWER TTL INTEGRATED CIRCUITS

THIS REPORT SUMMARIZES RELIABILITY TEST DATA GENERATED USING LOW-POWER TTL INTEGRATED CIRCUITS IN BOTH HERMETIC AND PLASTIC PACKAGES. THE INTEGRATED CIRCUITS TESTED WERE MANUFACTURED DURING 1970 AND THE FIRST HALF OF 1971. THE TESTS WERE CONDUCTED OVER THIS 18-MONTH PERIOD. HENCE THE 3801 DEVICES TESTED WERE SPREAD EVENLY ACROSS THE TIME PERIOD.

Multistategy Learning for Computer Vision

Current IU algorithms and systems lack the robustness to successfully process imagery acquired under real-world scenario. They do not provide the necessary consistency, reliability and predictability of results. Robust 3-D object recognition, in practical applications, remains one of the important but elusive goals of IU research. With the goal of achieving robustness, our research at UCR is directed towards learning parameters, feedback, contexts, features, concepts, and strategies of IU algorithms for model-based object recognition. Our multi strategy learning-based approach is to selectively apply machine learning techniques at multiple levels to achieve robust recognition performance. At each level, appropriate evaluation criteria are employed to monitor the performance and self-improvement of the system. The results of our research are being applied in automatic target recognition, autonomous navigation, and image and video databases.

Naval Research Laboratory Preparation for Year 2000

The overall audit objective was to determine whether the Naval Research Laboratory is adequately preparing its information technology systems to resolve data processing issues regarding the year 2000 computing problem. Specifically, the audit determined whether the Naval Research Laboratory complied with the Department of the Navy Year 2000 Action Plan.

RAC PERIODIC SUMMARY - MICROELECTRONIC MALFUNCTIONS IN EQUIPMENT

Year 2000 Contract Language for Weapon Systems.

This report is one of a series of reports being issued by the Inspector General, DoD, in accordance with an informal partnership with the Chief Information Officer, DoD, to monitor DoD efforts to address the year 2000 computing challenge. This report summarizes the efforts of DoD Program Management Offices to incorporate year 2000 compliance language into contracts and solicitations for their weapon systems. The year 2000 problem is the term most often used to describe the potential failure of information technology systems to process or perform date-related functions before, on, or after the turn of the next century. Our overall audit objective was to determine whether planning and management within selected components of DoD are adequate to ensure that continuity of operations are not unduly disrupted by year-2000-related issues. Specifically, we evaluated the actions of the DoD Program Management Offices to include year 2000 contract language in weapon systems contracts.

WOCSDICE 1998: 22nd Workshop on Compound Semiconductor Devices and Integrated Circuits, May 24-27, 1998, Zeuthen, Germany.

The Final Proceedings for 22nd Workshop on Compound Semiconductor Devices and Integrated Circuits, 24 May 1998-27 May 1998 This is an interdisoplinary conference. Topics include material growth and characterization, recent developments in MESFETS, HEMTs, and HBTs, MMlC-Technology, Microwave and millimeter wave power devices, GaN- Devices, Mesoscopic devices, Optical Ics, Reliability and CharacterIzation, Technological Building Blocks for devices.

WOCSDICE '98, 22nd Workshop on Compound Semiconductor Devices and Integrated Circuits, May 24-27, 1998, Pannonia Seehotel, Zeuthen, Germany.

The Final Proceedings for 22nd Workshop on Compound Semiconductor Devices and Integrated Circuits, 24 May 1998 - 27 May 1998 This is an interdisciplinary conference. Topics include material growth and characterization, recent developments in MESFETS, HEMTs, and HBTs, MMlC-Technology, Microwave and millimeter wave power devices, GaN- Devices, Mesoscopic devices, Optical Ics, Reliability and Characterization, Technological Building Blocks for devices.

Dynamically Altered Compliant Surface and Measuring Equipment for use in the Control of Separation by Oscillatory Means

We have selected a vendor (DANTEC) and purchased a three dimensional LDA. The selection process took over 6 months to complete with three companies competing (DANTEC, AEROMETRICS & TSI). The instrument has been installed and was immediately used on two DoD sponsored projects: (1) On a boundary layer that is continuously maintained on the verge of separation (the Stratford ramp), a project that is sponsored by ONR. (2) On studying the separation of a wall jet that flows over a circular cylinder. In both experiments regions of local, time dependent reverse flow were detected and the typical hot wire was incapable to provide accurate results. I am enclosing a copy of an article that was very recently accepted for publication by the Journal of Fluid Mechanics after we have checked the reliability of the data with the new equipment that was purchased on this grant (see specifically figures 3-5).

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