This workshop will take place from June 1st to 3rd 2026 at ESA/ESTEC (Noordwijk, The Netherlands). It will be held on-site only; remote participation will not be possible.

RAMS is a discipline under the aegis of Product Assurance but with strong links to System Engineering. Its dedicated methods and techniques aim at improving the Reliability, Availability, Maintainability and Safety of systems at all levels of a project.

This RAMS workshop will provide participants with a comprehensive overview of what RAMS is and its application to space projects. The intent is not only to introduce the main notions but also to explain what outputs are expected from SMEs through full examples developed jointly during the sessions.

On day 1, an overall introduction to RAMS is proposed in the morning, followed by a full afternoon dedicated to Failure Modes and Effects Analyses (FMEA): what is expected through this analysis, what format is recommended and how the analysis should be conducted, with application examples provided.

On day 2, the morning will be split between an introduction to Safety, in particular what the safety analyses to be produced should be like. This will be followed by a module about the different modelling tools to support reliability calculations at subsystem and system levels (Reliability Block Diagrams, Markov Chains, Monte-Carlo simulations) applied to examples. The afternoon will consist in a training course about the FIDES reliability calculation followed by the application on an example on the FIDES 2009 ExperTool calculation tool. The focus will be on what needs to be modelled and how, and what are the best practice tips that could help new users.

Day 3 introduces the concept of Availability (e.g. explanation of what is mean availability, instant availability…), and also the contribution of Reliability analyses to the Space Debris Mitigation initiative for the end of life/passivation probabilities to be demonstrated. Before the end of the workshop, the RAMS experts of ESA will answer any residual questions as some tours of the ESTEC laboratories take place.

Target group

This course is of particular interest to participants from Small- and Medium-sized Enterprises (SME) in ESA Member States, Associate Members or Cooperating States, who have limited knowledge of RAMS activities, and are providing or intending to provide products for the space sector.

This course is limited to 25 participants in total, hence, a maximum of 2 participants per company can be admitted. Preference will be given to participants from SMEs. Participants are requested to provide their esa-star Entity Code at the time of registration.

The session is intended to be an introduction to RAMS activities in ESA projects for companies which are not yet familiar with these practices. It includes hands-on applications led by ESA RAMS experts. The objective of this workshop is to learn more about what is expected in terms of RAMS analyses and associated documentation within the frame of space projects.

Mon, 1 June 2026

10:00 - 10:20    Arrival and welcome
10:20 - 10:30    SME Office introduction and tour de table
10:30 - 12:30    Introduction to RAMS
12:30 - 13:30    Lunch
13:30 - 17:30    FMEA: Introduction to the method and application to examples
 

Tue, 2 June 2026

08:30 - 10:30    Introduction to Safety analyses – Hazard analysis and Inputs to Safety submission
10:30 - 12:30    Reliability modelling – Introduction to RBDs, Markov chains, Montecarlo simulations with practical examples
12:30 - 13:30    Lunch
13:30 - 17:30    Introduction to the FIDES reliability method and application to practical examples
 

Wed, 3 June 2026

08:30 - 09:30    Availability – Introduction to the main concepts
09:30 - 10:30    Reliability in support to Space debris mitigation
10:30 - 12:30    Q&A and visit to the laboratory
 

ESA RAMS Section (TEC-QPR)

Please inform the organisers at your earliest convenience by sending an email to: learninghub@esa.int