Final engineering specifications for a new vehicles electronics system are nearing completion. This system is comprised of 5 subsystems, all of which must be functional for the complete system to work. To limit the possibility that the system will fail, the 5 subsystems have built in redundancy to lower the probability of failure. For each of the 5 systems, the table below gives the amount of redundancy (number of identical components in a subsystem) and the reliability of each component. The reliability is the probability that the component will stay functional. For a subsystem to fail, all of the identical components in that subsystem must fail. So for instance, if a subsystem has two identical components, and the reliability of the component is 0.50, then failure would be like flipping a coin and getting two tails, certainly better than 0.50.

Simulate this system in EXCEL and comment on your results. Your analysis should include information about which subsystem(s) seems to be the more common failure point.

Subsystem 1 2 Redundant Components 5 3 2 1 1 1 Reliability 0.85 0.95 0.97 0.998 0.999 3 4 5