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.

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.

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.Our research group in Nagoya, Japan has continued to study reliability theory and applications for more than twenty years, and has presented and published many good papers at international conferences and in journals. This book focuses mainly on how to apply the results of reliability theory to practical models. Theoretical results of coherent, inspection, and damage systems are summarized methodically, using the techniques of stochastic processes. There exist optimization problems in computer and management sciences and engineering. It is shown that such problems as computer, information and network systems are solved by using the techniques of reliability. Furthermore, some useful techniques applied to the analysis of stochastic models in management science and plants are shown.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.

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.

“Failure Rate Modeling for Reliability and Risk” focuses on reliability theory, and to the failure rate (hazard rate, force of mortality) modeling and its generalizations to systems operating in a random environment and to repairable systems. The failure rate is one of the crucial probabilistic characteristics for a number of disciplines; including reliability, survival analysis, risk analysis and demography. The book presents a systematic study of the failure rate and related indices, and covers a number of important applications where the failure rate plays the major role. Applications in engineering systems are studied, together with some actuarial, biological and demographic examples. The book provides a survey of this broad and interdisciplinary subject which will be invaluable to researchers and advanced students in reliability engineering and applied statistics, as well as to demographers, econometricians, actuaries and many other mathematically oriented researchers.

This book was written for an introductory one-semester or two-quarter course in stochastic processes and their applications. The reader is assumed to have a basic knowledge of analysis and linear algebra at an undergraduate level. Stochastic models are applied in many fields such as engineering systems, physics, biology, operations research, business, economics, psychology, and linguistics. Stochastic modeling is one of the promising kinds of modeling in applied probability theory. This book is intended to introduce basic stochastic processes: Poisson pro cesses, renewal processes, discrete-time Markov chains, continuous-time Markov chains, and Markov-renewal processes. These basic processes are introduced from the viewpoint of elementary mathematics without going into rigorous treatments. This book also introduces applied stochastic system modeling such as reliability and queueing modeling. Chapters 1 and 2 deal with probability theory, which is basic and prerequisite to the following chapters. Many important concepts of probabilities, random variables, and probability distributions are introduced. Chapter 3 develops the Poisson process, which is one of the basic and im portant stochastic processes. Chapter 4 presents the renewal process. Renewal theoretic arguments are then used to analyze applied stochastic models. Chapter 5 develops discrete-time Markov chains. Following Chapter 5, Chapter 6 deals with continuous-time Markov chains. Continuous-time Markov chains have im portant applications to queueing models as seen in Chapter 9. A one-semester course or two-quarter course consists of a brief review of Chapters 1 and 2, fol lowed in order by Chapters 3 through 6.

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, 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, experiments, and applied probability and statistics.