Risknowlogy

Risknowlogy Technologies is a Netherlands based company that provides the knowledge, tools, techniques, and sources to carry out technical risk management.

Business Problems

During the process of developing a new product or a process, the engineer is often faced with the task of designing a system that conforms to a set of reliability specifications. The engineer is given the goal for the system and must then develop a design that achieves the desired reliability of the system while performing all of the system's intended functions at a minimum cost. Markov modeling is a technique used in the reliability industry to calculate the reliability of a product. Typical information that a reliability engineer is interested in is ?How often does my product fail?, ?How often does it work with 1 failure in the system?, ?How often does it have no failures? etc. In order to calculate these probabilities an engineer needs to make a reliability model and understand the failure behavior of the system subject to analysis. Risknowlogy needed a tool that could simulate a real world process and make a Markov model from it, which could be subsequently used to make Reliability calculations for the system.

The BrickRed team recommended a JAVA Swing based GUI application that makes it is easy to create, save and edit Markov models, and has the added advantage of compatability on all platforms. A Markov model consists of states and of transitions between these states. The user can create new states by placing ?drag and drop? components on a canvas, grouping and linking them as required while creating a complete Markov model. The user has the capability to assign different datasets and calculation sets to the links that depicts transition between these states. All this information is captured in an XML file called as ?Calculation Engine Data?. Using JNI, this XML file is passed to calculation engine that is written in C. The result set returned by the calculation engine, which is also an XML file, is graphically depicted for user to see results in a simplified and more informational way. These results could also be exported as a report in HTML format. BrickRed developed the Risknowlogy?s GUI Markov Tool from its offshore development center in Noida, India.

Benefits

The great benefits to Risknowlogy can just be summarized in few words "Better Software with Fewer Resources Consumed". "It would have taken 8 to 10 months to develop GUI for Markov model tool internally," says the customer. "Now, because we have the expertise of Brickred in this domain, we released it about four times faster and with much better quality than we would have been able to develop ourselves."

Not even the time to release the product was shortened, the development cost was also reduced by more than one third of what it would have been with Risknowlogy developing at it's own. Since Risknowlogy doesn't need to have full time employees for maintentace of GUI, major cost reduction is also reflected in the maintenance and enhancement of the product.