Amanda Gillespie, Mark Monaghan, and Yuan Chen, win ASQ Best Paper Award at 2012 RAMS

Congratulations to Amanda Gillespie, Mark Monaghan, and Yuan Chen. Their paper, “Comparison Modeling of System Reliability for Future NASA Projects,” won the award for the best paper by an ASQ Reliability Division member at the 2012 Reliability and Maintainability Symposium in January. Gillespie and Monaghan are a Reliability Engineers with SAIC at NASA Kennedy Space Center in Florida; Chen is a senior member of technical staff with the Electronic Systems Branch, NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. The paper presented a methodology combining reliability block diagram analysis, cut set analysis, comparison modeling, and Fussell-Vesely importance measures to better understand and compare the vulnerabilities of future NASA launch vehicle architectures under possible application scenarios. This approach allowed the design team to address the deficiencies in the design architectures more efficiently, while balancing the need to design for optimum weight and space allocations. The paper was presented at RAMS by Amanda Gillespie. The award, which will be presented annually, was initiated last year by the RD Executive committee to recognize the contributions of RD members to RAMS and to encourage more RD members to submit papers to RAMS. The selection committee, appointed by the executive committee, reviewed all of the papers submitted to RAMS by ASQ-RD members, selected five finalist papers, attended the presentations of those papers at RAMS, and selected the winner based on both the content and quality of the written text and the presentation. John Bowles, chair of the selection committee said “We were pleased with the quality of the papers submitted and look forward to having even more next year.” The award has two parts: a $500 honorarium distributed to the winners and a plaque to be presented at the ASQ-RD dinner at the 2013 RAMS.