Accelerated service life testing - reliability in fast motion.
RAMS/LCC stands for Reliability, Availability, Maintainability, Safety and Life Cycle Costs. The term describes the entire field of reliability engineering – in particular the interface between technical performance and the associated or influenced costs.
Significance in practice
RAMS/LCC plays a central role in industries where safety and availability are business-critical, for example in rail technology. Here, the RAM characteristics of a system component are directly incorporated into the life cycle costs incurred.
- The higher the reliability, the less often repairs are necessary.
- Every repair means costs and downtime.
- High reliability often requires more expensive technologies or tightly synchronized maintenance schedules - which in turn increases life cycle costs.
This creates a conflict of objectives between costs, maintenance effort and availability, which must be resolved as part of RAM/LCC analyses.
The goal: cost-optimized system availability over the entire service life of the system.
Our services
- Advice for operators, system integrators and suppliers in the field of RAM/LCC
- Determination of product parameters for RAM/LCC calculations (MTTF, MTTR, MTBF)
- Calculation of system availability
- Optimization and calculation of life cycle costs, taking system availability into account
- Performing sensitivity and uncertainty analyses to identify the main sources of uncertainty in LCC forecasts
- Optimization of the maintenance strategy (maintenance plans, preventive and corrective maintenance)
In combination with other methods
RAMS/LCC forms the basis of many reliability analyses and is closely related to the Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM), Warranty Management and Reliability Process methods. Together, they enable reliability to be evaluated and optimized not only technically but also economically – a key factor in industries such as transport, rail & aviation and energy.
