Reliability Assessment

Abstract

Reliability is a critical attribute for the modern technological components and systems. This chapter offers a basic introduction to the related definitions, models and computation methods for reliability assessments. It briefly introduces several commonly used discrete and continuous distributions for component reliability modeling. Different from the traditional reliability assessment approach, the Physics-of-Failure represents an approach to reliability assessment based on modeling and simulation of the physical processes leading to the occurrence of failures in an item. Compared with the single component case, the system reliability modeling and assessment is more complicated. There are many reliability assessment approaches developed to compute the reliability of complex systems, e.g. networks. Path-set and cut-set methods, decomposition and factorization methods, and binary decision diagram are four commonly used methods.