The ReliaFree Project thanks Sourceforge.net for their support of open source software and for hosting the ReliaFree Project.

The ReliaFree Project At A Glance

• The ReliaFree Project began as a SourceForge hosted project on April 17, 2007.
• The ReliaFree Project is currently looking for C, GTK2, and MySQL developers. If you are interested, please contact the ReliaFree Project administrator at weibullguy@users.sourceforge.net.

The ReliaFree Project Overview

The ReliaFree Project is an open-source alternative to commercial, proprietary Reliability, Availability, Maintainability, and Safety (RAMS) analyses software. Currently in the planning stage with only a skeleton of the code base developed, many of the statements on this page are forward looking and describe currently planned functionality. ReliaFree is expected to assist the design assurance analyst in performing the following analyses. ReliaSoft provides a comprehensive listing of US DoD military standards and handbooks related to RAMS. Additionally, these documents can be retrieved from the United States DoD ASSIST database directly at http://www.assistdocs.com.

• US DoD MIL-HDBK-217F, MIL-HDBK-217FN1, and MIL-HDBK-217FN2 Part Count Reliability Prediction
• US DoD MIL-HDBK-217F, MIL-HDBK-217FN1, and MIL-HDBK-217FN2 Part Stress Reliability Prediction
• US DoD MIL-STD-1629A Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA)
• US DoD MIL-STD-1629A Criticality Analysis (CA)
• US NRC NUREG-0492 Fault Tree Analysis, both qualitative and quantitative
• US DoD MIL-STD-756B Reliability Block Diagramming
• Life data (Weibull) analyses
• Life cycle cost (LCC) analyses
• US DoD MIL-STD-2155 Failure Reporting, Analysis, and Corrective Action (FRACA)

As an integrated suite of tools, any number of the analyses can be "linked" together such that an update to one module will result in all "linked" modules being updated appropriately. This approach also provides a closed loop life-cycle with visibility into a product's performance throughout. The same database is used to store field failure data as is used to store design prediction information. Thus, failures in fielded products can be used to modify future prediction results.

The ReliaFree Project Source Code

ReliaFree uses XML files to store configuration parameters and default values such as the reliability functions found in MIL-HDBK-217F. Here is a portion of some example files. A particular system being modeled with ReliaFree would maintain its specific information in a MySQL database. Site-wide part information would also be stored in a MySQL database to ensure consistent inputs and revisions to RAMS analyses. The user interface is graphical and uses GTK+-2.0. All of these elements are bound together using C.

A simplified overview of the software technologies currently used or being planned for use by the ReliaFree Project can be found here. This is in PDF format.

You can checkout a copy of the current source code if you have an SVN client. The following will create a new directory named 'reliafree' in the current directory. Use autogen to create a Makefile.

svn co https://reliafree.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/reliafree/trunk reliafree

The ReliaFree Project Dependencies

ReliaFree uses or currently plans to use the following open source software to provide the RAMS analyses solution:

• libXML2 to interact with configuration and default value XML files.
• GNU libmatheval to parse and calculate functions read from default value XML files.
• GNU Scientific Library to perform mathematics more complex than arithmetic.
• MySQL to store design specific and site-wide part information and calculation results.
• GNU Plot to produce simple 2D and 3D graphics.
• VTK to produce complex, customer-centric graphics.
• Graphviz to create graphical models such as Fault Trees and Reliability Block diagrams.
• libnotify to send user-space messages and non-critical warnings.
• BLAS and LAPACK to provide algebra libraries optimized for the user's architecture.
• SQLite to satisfy database requirements for users with smaller systems.