Reliability, Availability, and Maintainability Considerations in the Design and Evaluation of Physical Security Systems

The design of critical and complex integration of large systems benefit from an analysis that evaluates the system design against, sometimes competing, system or component design goals and requirements early in the conceptual design phase of the project. One type of analysis evaluates how the reliability, availability, and maintainability (RAM) of the system components and how the system components function together with the related equipment or components used. Taken as a whole, RAM analysis ties the design directly to the desired functionality, operability, and integrity of the system. The concept of RAM analysis is not new and has been extensively reviewed and analyzed in many texts and papers. The purpose of the paper is to provide a simple model with examples of how RAM analysis can impact design decisions such as component selection, redundancy determination and future operations of a physical protection intrusion detection system. The examples will also show that such analyses should encompass more than just the intrusion detection system design by including supporting infrastructures, such as the access control system or delay features inherent in the facility design, which can impact the functionality and integrity of the system. Using such analyses for major systems and system integration provides a tool that assists engineers in providing effective designs and provides a basis for the Competent Authority to make informed decisions. Additional advantages of using and updating the RAM analysis periodically throughout the lifecycle of the project will also become obvious.