Reliability engineering is a rapidly evolving discipline, whose purpose is to develop methods and tools to predict, evaluate, and demonstrate reliability, maintainability, and availability of components, equipment, and systems, as well as to support development and production engineers in building in reliability and maintainability. To be cost and time effective, reliability engineering has to be coordinated with quality assurance activities, in agreement with Total Quality Management (TQM) and Concurrent Engineering efforts. To build in reliability and maintainability into complex equipment or systems, failure rate and failure mode analyses have to be performed early in the development phase and be supported by design guidelines for reliability, maintainability, and software quality as well as by extensive design reviews. Before production, qualification tests on prototypes are necessary to ensure that quality and reliability targets have been met. In the production phase, processes need to be selected and monitored to assure the required quality level. For many systems, availability requirements have also to be satisfied. In these cases, stochastic processes can be used to investigate and optimize availability. including logistical support as well. Software often plays a dominant role, requiring specific quality assurance activities. This book presents the state-of-the-art of reliability engineering, both in theory and practice. It is based on over 25 years experience of the author in this field, half of which was in industry and half as Professor for reliability engineering at the ETH (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich).
