Digital Twin: Toward the Integration Between System Design and RAMS Assessment Through the Model-Based Systems Engineering

The design of a safety-critical system requires an effective prediction of its reliability, availability, maintainability, and safety (RAMS). Anticipating the RAMS analysis at the concept design helps the designer in the tradeoff of the system architecture and technologies, reduces the cost of product development and the time to market. This action is rather difficult, because the RAMS analysis deals with the hazard assessment of system components, whose abstraction at concept level is never simple. Therefore, to integrate the system design and RAMS assessment, a clear path to follow is required. This article investigates how the model-based systems engineering supports this task and drives the system reliability allocation, through the functional and dysfunctional analyses. The implementation of the proposed approach needs to set up the tool chain. In the industrial context, it must be compatible with practices, standards, and tools currently used in product development. Defining a suitable process of integration of tools used for the system design and the safety engineering is a need of the industry. Therefore, this task is also discussed, in this article, dealing with some examples of industrial test cases.