The Reliability of Airborne Radar Equipment

One of the current aims in the design of electronic machines is the development of higher performance equipment utilizing, where possible, automatic control, guidance, and computing features. The incorporation of these features generally results in more complex and, hence, less reliable equipment. Since many situations requiring highly complex machinery also require a high degree of reliability, designers and users alike are confronted with the problems of deciding what degree of reliability in a given operation is acceptable and of determining the degree of complexity in a machine that will decrease the reliability beyond this acceptable value. The present paper examines these questions as they pertain to airborne radar equipment, whose growth in complexity in recent years has paralleled that of Naval electronics in general.

Operations Research, ISSN 0030-364X, was published as Journal of the Operations Research Society of America from 1952 to 1955 under ISSN 0096-3984.