Prescribing and Implementing the Risk in Early Design (RED) Method

Abstract

To aid designer’s abilities to increase product safety and reliability, risk assessments need to be moved forward to the conceptual design phase of a product. This is especially difficult because often the product has not assumed a physical form in this design stage. In an effort to perform risk assessments based on function, rather than physical components, the risk in early design (RED) method was developed. This paper presents the function based mathematical mappings of the RED method for preliminary risk assessments based on catalogued historical failure information. An example of the RED preliminary risk assessments on a thermal control subsystem along with heuristics for applying the particular types of risk assessments are discussed. Finally, the steps for performing RED in the conceptual design phase are offered. The heuristics and steps for preliminary risk assessments shown offer a method for identifying potential areas of concern in a product during the early stages of design when much can be done to over come them.Copyright © 2006 by ASME