Associate Professor
John B. Bowles

Research Interests | Biography | Publications | Contact Information











CONTACT INFORMATION

bowles@engr.sc.edu
Phone: (803) 777-2689

RESEARCH INTERESTS

The --ilities: reliability, maintainability, supportability,
producibility, etc., are quite simply the requirements for designing a
product so that it will work, not just occasionally but every
time it is needed. Many of the techniques used to produce a reliable
design are the result of lessons learned over a long history of
experience with earlier products. They include:
Predicting when components will fail, determining the effects of the
failure on the system's operation, and designing the system to mitigate
these effects rather than letting them escalate.
Controlling the amount of variation in manufacturing processes and
making the system design robust enough to tolerate the variances and
still work properly. Applying human factors to ensure that maintenance
operations are easy to perform. Using life-cycle cost analysis to evaluate
design tradeoffs.

Expert systems provide one way of ensuring that these lessons are
applied effectively in the design of new products. One major project now
underway is to build an expert system to assist a designer in performing
a "Failure Modes and Effects Analysis" on a system.
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BIOGRAPHY

John B. Bowles received a B.S. degree in Engineering Science from
the University of Virginia in 1969, an M.S. in Applied Mathematics from
the University of Michigan in 1970 and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from
Rutgers University in 1982.
Before joining the University of South Carolina faculty,
Dr. Bowles was project leader of the Systems Analysis Group, Advanced System
Development at NCR Corporation and a Member of the technical staff
at Bell Laboratories. At NCR, he was responsible for measurement,
modeling and analysis of the performance of a variety of computer
systems and communication networks.
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PUBLICATIONS

A survey of reliability prediction procedures for microelectronic devices
IEEE Transactions on Reliability
Apr. 1992, pp. 2--11.
by Dr. J. B. Bowles

A blackboard model for an expert system for failure modes and effects analysis
Proceedings of the Annual Reliability and Maintainability Symposium
1992, pp. 483--490
by D. J. Russomanno, Prof. R. D. Bonnell and Dr. J. B. Bowles

Bad code
IEEE Spectrum
Aug. 1992, pp. 36--40
by Dr. J. B. Bowles and C. E. Pelaez

Failure modes, effects, and criticality analysis
Reliability Engineering Handbook
K. A. Kapur (Ed.), Marcel Dekker (to be published in 1993)
by Dr. J. B. Bowles and Prof. R. D. Bonnell
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