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The increasing complexity of aerospace products and programs and the growing competitive pressure is facilitating the aggregation of small, medium and large enterprises of certain geographical regions into more integrated and collaborative entities (clusters). Clusters are by their same nature formed by heterogeneous companies, with huge differences not only in size but also for their core competences: such a diversity is a strength of the cluster, but it also increases its complexity. The purpose of this paper is to describe a benchmarking methodology that can be adopted to assess the performances of companies belonging to a cluster from different perspectives: economics and financials, competitive differentiators, specific know how, business strategies, production and logistic effectiveness, quality of core and supporting processes.

Up to now, the reliability achieved by COTS components was largely sufficient for avionics, in terms of failure rate as well as time to failure. With the implementation of new and more integrated technologies (90 nm node, 65 nm and below), the question has arisen of the impact of the new technologies on reliability. It has been stated that the lifetime of these new technologies might decrease. The drift is expected to be technology dependent: integration, technology node, materials, elementary structure choices and process pay a key role. Figures have been published, which gives smaller lifetime than the 30 years generally required for avionics. This would of course impact not only the reliability, but also the maintenance of COTS-based avionics. Hence a new policy should be defined for the whole COTS supply chain. Faced with these impending risks, different methodologies have been developed [1], [2].