VI. A. 1. b. Planning – System Effectiveness

(B) 80%

System effectiveness is defined as

A measure of the extent to which a system may be expected to achieve a set of specific mission requirements expressed as a function of availability, dependability, and capability.

McGraw-Hill Dictionary of Scientific & Technical Terms, 6E. S.v. “system effectiveness.” Retrieved April 19 2016 from http://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/system+effectiveness

This dictionary definition derives from the work of the Weapons Systems Effectiveness Industry Advisory Committee (WSEIAC) report in 1964.
The ARINC Research Corporation (1965 report) defines system effectiveness as a function of mission reliability, operational readiness and design adequacy.

Figure 7.7 page 271 of Reliability Engineering Handbook by Dodson and Nolan , CRC Press 1999

Which are similar to the common definition with three elements. All three terms in ARNINC’s definition are within the problem.

The other two values, availability and maintainability are distractors from the common definition. Knowing only the common definition we could substitute operational readiness for availability, mission reliability for dependability and design adequacy for capability, as the concepts are similar. Yet in this case the three terms from the ARNIC definition are within the problem there use mission reliability, operational readiness and design adequacy.

The tricky part is there is a value for availability stated in the problem and it’s not the same as the value for operational readiness.

Thus the solution is 0.99 x 0.87 x 0.93 = 0.80

The distractors use combinations of the other available values.