Reliability theory is a major concern for engineers and managers engaged in making high quality products and designing highly reliable systems. “Advanced Reliability Models and Maintenance Policies” is a survey of new research topics in reliability theory and optimization techniques in reliability engineering. The book introduces partition and redundant problems within reliability models, and provides optimization techniques. The book also indicates how to perform maintenance in a finite time span and at failure detection, and to apply recovery techniques for computer systems. New themes such as reliability complexity and service reliability in reliability theory are theoretically proposed, and optimization problems in management science using reliability techniques are presented. The book is an essential guide for graduate students and researchers in reliability theory, and a valuable reference for reliability engineers engaged both in maintenance work and in management and computer systems.

This book surveys the recent development of maintenance theory, advanced maintenance techniques with shock and damage models, and their applications in computer systems dealing with efficiency problems. It also equips readers to handle multiple maintenance, informs maintenance policies, and explores comparative methods for several different kinds of maintenance. Further, it discusses shock and damage modelling as an important failure mechanism for reliability systems, and extensively explores the degradation processes, failure modes, and maintenance characteristics of modern, highly complex systems, especially for some key mechanical systems designed for specific tasks.

Many serious accidents have happened in the world where systems have been large-scale and complex, and have caused heavy damage and a social sense of instability. Furthermore, advanced nations have almost ?nished public inf- structureandrushedintoamaintenanceperiod.Maintenancewillbemore- portant than production, manufacture, and construction, that is, more ma- tenance for environmental considerations and for the protection of natural resources. From now on, the importance of maintenance will increase more and more. In the past four decades, valuable contributions to maintenance policies in reliability theory have been made. This book is intended to s- marize the research results studied mainly by the author in the past three decades. The book deals primarily with standard to advanced problems of main- nance policies for system reliability models. System reliability can be mainly improved by repair and preventive maintenance, and replacement, and rel- bility properties can be investigated by using stochastic process techniques. The optimum maintenance policies for systems that minimize or maximize appropriate objective functions under suitable conditions are discussed both analytically and practically. The book is composed of nine chapters. Chapter 1 is devoted to an int- duction to reliability theory, and brie?y reviews stochastic processes needed for reliability and maintenance theory. Chapter 2 summarizes the results of repair maintenance, which is the most basic maintenance in reliability. The repair maintenance of systems such as the one-unit system and multiple-unit redundant systems is treated. Chapters 3 through 5 summarize the results of three typical maintenance policies of age, periodic, and block replacements.

The 2004 Asian International Workshop on Advanced Reliability Modeling is a symposium for the dissemination of state-of-the-art research and the presentation of practice in reliability engineering and related issues in Asia. It brings together researchers, scientists and practitioners from Asian countries to discuss the state of research and practice in dealing with reliability issues at the system design (modeling) level, and to jointly formulate an agenda for future research in this engineering area. The proceedings cover all the key topics in reliability, maintainability and safety engineering, providing an in-depth presentation of theory and practice.The proceedings have been selected for coverage in:• Index to Scientific & Technical Proceedings® (ISTP® / ISI Proceedings)• Index to Scientific & Technical Proceedings (ISTP CDROM version / ISI Proceedings)• CC Proceedings — Engineering & Physical Sciences

This is the first monograph which presents shock and damage models in reliability from introduction to application. Stochastic processes are introduced before current developments are surveyed. The practical applications of shock and damage models are demonstrated using case studies. The author is a leading researcher in this field with more than thirty years of experience. Reliability engineers and managers of maintenance work will find this book a broad reference.

The 2006 Asian International Workshop on Advanced Reliability Modeling (AIWARM) is the second symposium in a series of biennial workshops for the dissemination of state-of-art research and the presentation of practice in reliability and maintenance engineering in Asia. It brings together researchers and engineers from not only Asian countries but also all over world to discuss the state of research and practice in dealing with both reliability issues at the system design phase and maintenance issues at the system operation phase. The theme of AIWARM 2006 is “reliability testing and improvement”. The contributions in this volume cover all the main topics in reliability and maintenance engineering, providing an in-depth presentation of theory and practice.

ADVANCED TECHNIQUES FOR MAINTENANCE MODELING AND RELIABILITY ANALYSIS OF REPAIRABLE SYSTEMS This book covers advanced models and methodologies for reliability analysis of large, complex, and critical repairable systems that undergo imperfect maintenance actions in industries having MRO facilities and also covers real-life examples from the field of aviation. The content presented in this book is inspired by the existing limitations of the generalized renewal process (GRP) model and the problems confronted by the maintenance, repair, and operations (MRO) facilities in industries dealing with large and complex repairable systems. Through this book, the authors have attempted to equip the MRO facilities with more advanced scientific tools and techniques by addressing various limitations related to the reliability analysis of repairable systems. The book is dedicated to various imperfect maintenance-based virtual age models and methodologies to bridge various research gaps present in the available literature. A summary of deliverables is as follows: Presents the basic concepts of maintenance and provides a virtual age model that can accommodate all maintenance; Provides the basic concepts of censoring in repairable systems along with the concept of black box and failure modes. Also highlighted is how the proposed work will be useful for industries conducting failure modes and effect analysis (FMEA) and estimating the mean residual life (MRL) of repairable systems; Presents methodology that applies risk-based threshold on intensity function and provides a threshold to declare the system/component as high failure rate components (HFRCs); Identifying a system as HFRCs is an important task, but for an industry dealing with critical systems, preventing the system from being HFRC is more important, since the risk involved in such systems would be very high. Thus, the book presents a progressive maintenance policy (PMP) for repairable systems; Focusses on qualitative analysis of repair quality. Assuming repair quality as a subjective variable, the authors have presented various factors that affect the repair quality most and modeled their interdependency using Bayesian networks (BN). Audience Professional reliability engineers, reliability administrators, consultants, managers, and post-graduate students in engineering schools. The book belongs to any engineering, technical, and academic institution concerned with manufacturing, production, aviation, defense, and software industries.