Historically, the reliability growth process has been thought of, and treated as, a reactive approach to growing reliability based on failures "discovered" during testing or, most unfortunately, once a system/product has been delivered to a customer. As a result, many reliability growth models are predicated on starting the reliability growth process at test time "zero", with some initial level of reliability (usually in the context of a time-based measure such as Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF)). Time "zero" represents the start of testing, and the initial reliability of the test item is based on its inherent design. The problem with this approach, still predominant today, is that it ignores opportunities to grow reliability during the design of a system or product, i.e., opportunities to go into reliability growth testing with a higher initial inherent reliability at time zero. In addition to the traditional approaches to reliability growth during test, this book explores the activities and opportunities that can be leveraged to promote and achieve reliability growth during the design phase of the overall system life cycle. The ability to do so as part of an integrated, proactive design environment has significant implications for developing and delivering reliable items quickly, on time and within budget. This book offers new definitions of how failures can be characterized, and how those new definitions can be used to develop metrics that will quantify how effective a Design for Reliability (DFR) process is in (1) identifying failure modes and (2) mitigating their root failure causes. Reliability growth can only occur in the presence of both elements.

Evaluating the cost of acquiring major pieces of equipment also necessitates costing their life maintenance. Providing coverage of recent advances in this field, this book covers such topics as reliability improvement warranty, computer hardware/software costing, and reliability engineering.

With the advent of the 80's there has been an increasing need for analytic and numerical techniques, based on a thorough understanding of microstructural processes, that express in a manner suitable for practicing engineers the reliability of components and structures that are being subjected to degradation situations. Such situations fall within the framework offracture mechanics, fatigue, corrosion fatigue and pitting corrosion. Luckily, such techniques are now being developed and it was felt timely to combine in one volume reports by the leaders in this field who are currently making great strides towards solving these problems. Hence the idea of this monograph was born and I am pleased to be associated both with it and the contributors whose chapters are included in this volume. A very large part of the credit for this monograph must go to the authors who have taken time out from their busy schedules to prepare their submissions. They have all worked diligently over the last few months in order to get their manuscripts to me on time and I sincerely thank them for their help throughout the preparation of this volume.