Our daily lives can be maintained by the high-technology systems. Computer systems are typical examples of such systems. We can enjoy our modern lives by using many computer systems. Much more importantly, we have to maintain such systems without failure, but cannot predict when such systems will fail and how to fix such systems without delay. A stochastic process is a set of outcomes of a random experiment indexed by time, and is one of the key tools needed to analyze the future behavior quantitatively. Reliability and maintainability technologies are of great interest and importance to the maintenance of such systems. Many mathematical models have been and will be proposed to describe reliability and maintainability systems by using the stochastic processes. The theme of this book is "Stochastic Models in Reliability and Main tainability. " This book consists of 12 chapters on the theme above from the different viewpoints of stochastic modeling. Chapter 1 is devoted to "Renewal Processes," under which classical renewal theory is surveyed and computa tional methods are described. Chapter 2 discusses "Stochastic Orders," and in it some definitions and concepts on stochastic orders are described and ag ing properties can be characterized by stochastic orders. Chapter 3 is devoted to "Classical Maintenance Models," under which the so-called age, block and other replacement models are surveyed. Chapter 4 discusses "Modeling Plant Maintenance," describing how maintenance practice can be carried out for plant maintenance.

This book is a collective work by many leading scientists, analysts, mathematicians, and engineers who have been working at the front end of reliability science and engineering. The book covers conventional and contemporary topics in reliability science, all of which have seen extended research activities in recent years. The methods presented in this book are real-world examples that demonstrate improvements in essential reliability and availability for industrial equipment such as medical magnetic resonance imaging, power systems, traction drives for a search and rescue helicopter, and air conditioning systems. The book presents real case studies of redundant multi-state air conditioning systems for chemical laboratories and covers assessments of reliability and fault tolerance and availability calculations. Conventional and contemporary topics in reliability engineering are discussed, including degradation, networks, and dynamic reliability, resilience, and multi-state systems, all of which are relatively new topics to the field. The book is aimed at engineers and scientists, as well as postgraduate students involved in reliability design, analysis, and experiments and applied probability and statistics.

This book provides a comprehensive up-to-date presentation of some of the classical areas of reliability, based on a more advanced probabilistic framework using the modern theory of stochastic processes. This framework allows analysts to formulate general failure models, establish formulae for computing various performance measures, as well as determine how to identify optimal replacement policies in complex situations. In this second edition of the book, two major topics have been added to the original version: copula models which are used to study the effect of structural dependencies on the system reliability; and maintenance optimization which highlights delay time models under safety constraints. Terje Aven is Professor of Reliability and Risk Analysis at University of Stavanger, Norway. Uwe Jensen is working as a Professor at the Institute of Applied Mathematics and Statistics of the University of Hohenheim in Stuttgart, Germany. Review of first edition: "This is an excellent book on mathematical, statistical and stochastic models in reliability. The authors have done an excellent job of unifying some of the stochastic models in reliability. The book is a good reference book but may not be suitable as a textbook for students in professional fields such as engineering. This book may be used for graduate level seminar courses for students who have had at least the first course in stochastic processes and some knowledge of reliability mathematics. It should be a good reference book for researchers in reliability mathematics." --Mathematical Reviews (2000)

"Reliability theory and applications become major concerns of engineers and managers engaged in making high quality products and designing highly reliable systems. This book aims to survey new research topics in reliability theory and useful applied techniques in reliability engineering." "The reader will learn new topics and techniques, and how to apply reliability models to actual ones. The book will serve as an essential guide to a subject of study for graduate students and researchers and as a useful guide for reliability engineers engaged not only in maintenance work but also in management and computer works." --Book Jacket.

Reliability theory is of fundamental importance for engineers and managers involved in the manufacture of high-quality products and the design of reliable systems. In order to make sense of the theory, however, and to apply it to real systems, an understanding of the basic stochastic processes is indispensable. As well as providing readers with useful reliability studies and applications, Stochastic Processes also gives a basic treatment of such stochastic processes as: the Poisson process, the renewal process, the Markov chain, the Markov process, and the Markov renewal process. Many examples are cited from reliability models to show the reader how to apply stochastic processes. Furthermore, Stochastic Processes gives a simple introduction to other stochastic processes such as the cumulative process, the Wiener process, the Brownian motion and reliability applications. Stochastic Processes is suitable for use as a reliability textbook by advanced undergraduate and graduate students. It is also of interest to researchers, engineers and managers who study or practise reliability and maintenance.

Stochastic processes are powerful tools for the investigation of reliability and availability of repairable equipment and systems. Because of the involved models, and in order to be mathematically tractable, these processes are generally confined to the class of regenerative stochastic processes with a finite state space, to which belong: renewal processes, Markov processes, semi-Markov processes, and more general regenerative processes with only one (or a few) regeneration staters). The object of this monograph is to review these processes and to use them in solving some reliability problems encountered in practical applications. Emphasis is given to a comprehensive exposition of the analytical procedures, to the limitations in volved, and to the unification and extension of. the models known in the literature. The models investigated here assume. that systems have only one repair crew and that no further failure can occur at system down. Repair and failure rates are general ized step-by-step, up to the case in which the involved process is regenerative with only one (or a few) regeneration state(s). Investigations deal with different kinds of reliabilities and availabilities for series/parallel structures. Preventive main tenance and imperfect switching are considered in some examples.