LOCATE release note: Common parts make product families reliable

The new release of Uptime LOCATE supports and simplifies the validation of multiple variants within one product family

Instead of individual products, families with a high fraction of common parts are now being developed. This has advantages throughout the entire life cycle:

• Different product properties can be displayed cost-effectively by means of software parameterization despite the same hardware.
• A high fraction of common parts between product configurations reduces manufacturing, logistics and maintenance costs.

Common parts also offer massive savings potential for reliability through joint testing. For this, however, it must be analyzed whether and how the risks of the different configurations differ.

The new release of Uptime LOCATE makes this possible by performing risk analysis for different configurations. It clarifies which risks are common to the product family and which are variant-specific. This decides which results can be transferred from one tested configuration to others.

To minimize the effort of endurance testing for many product variants, this methodology allows highly loaded configurations of a product family to be selected as test objects. The results of the common parts can then be transferred to other product configurations. This saves time and resources, while still allowing the most critical variants to be tested.

This approach forms the methodological basis for joint validation of product variants. In many cases, this is the only realistic way to validate a product family with the available resources.