Reliability Engineering Theory and Practice

This book shows how to build in, evaluate, and demonstrate reliability and availability of components, equipment, and systems. It presents the state-of-the-art of reliability engineering, in theory and practice, and is based on the author's 30 years experience in this field, half in industry and half as professor of Reliability Engineering at the ETH, Zurich. The structure of the book allows a rapid access to practical results (approximate expressions, design rules, test procedures). In this extended edition, new models and considerations have been added for reliability data analysis and fault tolerant reconfigurable repairable systems including reward and frequency/duration aspects. New design rules for imperfect switching, incomplete coverage, items with more than 2 states, and phased-mission systems, as well as a Monte Carlo approach useful for rare events are given. Trends in quality management are outlined. Methods and tools are given in a way that they can be tailored to cover different reliability requirement levels and be used to investigate safety as well. This book is a textbook establishing a link between theory and practice with a large number of tables, figures, and examples to support the practical aspects.