The reliability, availability, and productiveness of systems

the long version

This book is about the measurement and prediction of the reliability behaviour of systems of physical items. Previous books on system reliability have concentrated on only one or two of the six principal techniques available to the analyst. These are: probability theory, distributional statistics, Markov methods (matrix algebra), fault and event trees (Boolean algebra), theory of renewal processes, and directional graph theory (di-graphs). The Reliability, Availability and Productiveness of Systems relates all these methods to one another and to their applications. The authors are engineers rather than statisticians and take a practitioner's view of the degree of rigour required to 'prove' mathematical results. The aim is to make each technique and its limitations clear to working engineers, and every effort has therefore been made to keep the mathematical explanations as simple as possible. Nevertheless some prior knowledge of algebra, calculus, probability and statistics is assumed, to about the level usually reached in European courses for Bachelor's degrees in engineering. This book will be invaluable to reliability, systems and design engineers in industry, as well as graduate students and educators in all branches of engineering