Reliability Analysis, Safety Assessment and Optimization. Enrico Zio

Series Editor’s Foreword

       Dr. Andre V. Kleyner

      The Wiley Series in Quality & Reliability Engineering aims to provide a solid educational foundation for researchers and practitioners in the field of quality and reliability engineering and to expand the knowledge base by including the latest developments in these disciplines.

      The importance of quality and reliability to a system can hardly be disputed. Product failures in the field inevitably lead to losses in the form of repair cost, warranty claims, customer dissatisfaction, product recalls, loss of sale, and in extreme cases, loss of life.

      Engineering systems are becoming increasingly complex with added functions and capabilities; however, the reliability requirements remain the same or even growing more stringent. Modeling and simulation methods, such as Monte Carlo simulation, uncertainty analysis, system optimization, Markov analysis and others, have always been important instruments in the toolbox of design, reliability and quality engineers. However, the growing complexity of the engineering systems, with the increasing integration of hardware and software, is making these tools indispensable in today’s product development process.

      The recent acceleration of the development of new technologies including digitalization, forces the reliability professionals to look for more efficient ways to deliver the products to market quicker while meeting or exceeding the customer expectations of high product reliability. It is important to comprehensively measure the ability of a product to survive in the field. Therefore, modeling and simulation is vital to the assessment of product reliability, including the effect of variance on the expected product life, even before the hardware is built. Variance is present in the design parameters, material properties, use conditions, system interconnects, manufacturing conditions, lot-to-lot variation and many other product inputs, making it difficult to assess. Thus, modeling and simulation may be the only tools to fully evaluate the effect of variance in the early product development phases and to eventually optimize the design.

The book you are about to read has been written by leading experts in the field of reliability modeling, analysis, simulation and optimization. The book covers important topics, such as system reliability assessment, modeling and simulation, multi-state systems, optimization methods and their applications, which are highly critical to meeting the high demands for quality and reliability. Achieving the optimal feasible performance of the system is eventually the final objective in modern product design and manufacturing, and this book rightfully puts a lot of emphasis on the process of optimization.

      Paradoxically, despite its evident importance, quality and reliability disciplines are somewhat lacking in today’s engineering educational curricula. Only few engineering schools offer degree programs, or even a sufficient set of courses, in quality and reliability methods. The topics of reliability analysis, accelerated testing, reliability modeling and simulation, warranty data analysis, reliability growth programs, reliability design optimization and other aspects of reliability engineering receive very little coverage in today’s engineering students curricula. As a result, the majority of the quality and reliability practitioners receive their professional training from colleagues, professional seminars and professional publications. In this respect, this book is intended to contribute to closing this gap and provide additional educational material as a learning opportunity for a wide range of readers from graduate level students to seasoned reliability professionals.

      We are confident that this book, as well as this entire book series, will continue Wiley’s tradition of excellence in technical publishing and provide a lasting and positive contribution to the teaching and practice of reliability and quality engineering.