Centre for Advances in Reliability and Safety

Enhancing “Trust” in the Reliability and Safety of Hong Kong’s Advanced Products

As “re-industrialisation” has gained momentum in Hong Kong in recent years, the city’s new growth agenda now depends on the application of advanced technologies to manufacturing that once played a major role in the economy. Today, Hong Kong’s brands represent safe and reliable products and systems, and the Centre for Advances in Reliability and Safety (CAiRS) has been established to ensure and elevate “trust” in Hong Kong products using a top-down, problem-centric and collaborative approach.

CAiRS is a collaboration between The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) and the University of Maryland - College Park (UMD) from USA. The Centre gathers top local and overseas academics and scholars, uses advanced equipment, and leverages innovative artificial intelligence technology in order to conduct wide ranging product reliability and system safety research to accurately predict the occurrence of failures and prevent them from occurring. 

CAiRS has been admitted as one of the research centres in InnoHK Clusters, a major initiative of the HKSAR. CAiRS has carried out five research programmes to date, namely “Anomaly Detection and Syndromic Surveillances”, “Innovative Diagnostics for Health Management”, “Prognostics for Remaining Useful Life Assessment”, “Safety Assurance: Improve functional safety” and “Data Analytics Platform for Reliability” Under the 5 programs, there are 15 projects running in parallel. CAiRS’ mission is to develop new approaches for customised management to ensure the reliability and safety of products and systems which is readily and applicable to different Industries including advanced manufacturing sectors, electronic products, transportation, sensors, microelectronics, public utilities, IoT products, telecommunication, robots, and medical devices. With support from industry and big data, CAiRS focuses on:

• Identification and bridging of knowledge gaps in acquisition of useful data relating to reliability and safety of processes and products
• Development of AI technologies for bridging the above knowledge gaps
• Data characterisation, filtering and clustering to develop industry big data capabilities
• Research on failure modes and their criticality and trend analysis
• Integration of data-driven and physics of failure approaches to data sets for various industry sectors
• Development of algorithms for predictive failure of critical components and systems; and
• Formulation of practical modelling of products’ life prediction and process quality forecast

CAiRS is committed to conducting state-of-the-art interdisciplinary research in response to the needs of industry and society. With over 20 academics and scholars from the Faculty of Engineering of PolyU and UMD who has research excellence and track records in product reliability, and with strong support from industry, CAiRS will bring significant benefits and contributions to smart city development and smart manufacturing.

Time Tunnel — Introduction of CAiRS.

Laboratory of CAiRS installed a variety of advanced equipment for research on product reliability and system safety.

CAiRS Project Teams meeting to discuss progress of different projects.

Research programmes at CAiRS has adopted novel approaches such as fusion of reliability modelling and virtual qualification, machine learning algorithms for diagnostics and prognostics that allow self-reconfiguration and system resilience, as well as real-time prognostics to improve availability and affordability.

The Centre leverages the networks of existing industrial practitioners and organisations, such as the Hong Kong Electronic Industries Association (HKEIA), Hong Kong Electronics Industry Council (HKEIC) from Federation of Hong Kong Industries, to build a new consortium designed to help achieve its objectives.