The safe and continued functioning of critical infrastructures—such as electricity, natural gas, transportation, and water—is a social imperative. Yet the complex connections between these systems render them increasingly precarious. Furthermore, though we depend so heavily on interconnected infrastructures, we do not fully understand the risks involved in their failure. Emery Roe and Paul R. Schulman argue that designs, policies, and laws often overlook the knowledge and experiences of those who manage these systems on the ground—reliability professionals who have vital insights that would be invaluable to planning. To combat this major blind spot, the athors construct a new theoretical perspective that reveals how to make sense of complex interconnected networks and improve reliability through management, regulation, and political leadership. To illustrate their approach in action, they present a multi-year case study of one of the world's most important "infrastructure crossroads," the San Francisco Bay-Delta. Reliability and Risk advances our understanding of what it takes to ensure the dependability of the intricate—and sometimes hazardous—systems on which we rely every day.

Singh, Jain, and Tyagi present the key concepts of risk and reliability that apply to a wide array of problems in civil and environmental engineering.

Reliability, Maintainability and Risk: Practical Methods for Engineers, Eighth Edition, discusses tools and techniques for reliable and safe engineering, and for optimizing maintenance strategies. It emphasizes the importance of using reliability techniques to identify and eliminate potential failures early in the design cycle. The focus is on techniques known as RAMS (reliability, availability, maintainability, and safety-integrity). The book is organized into five parts. Part 1 on reliability parameters and costs traces the history of reliability and safety technology and presents a cost-effective approach to quality, reliability, and safety. Part 2 deals with the interpretation of failure rates, while Part 3 focuses on the prediction of reliability and risk. Part 4 discusses design and assurance techniques; review and testing techniques; reliability growth modeling; field data collection and feedback; predicting and demonstrating repair times; quantified reliability maintenance; and systematic failures. Part 5 deals with legal, management and safety issues, such as project management, product liability, and safety legislation. - 8th edition of this core reference for engineers who deal with the design or operation of any safety critical systems, processes or operations - Answers the question: how can a defect that costs less than $1000 dollars to identify at the process design stage be prevented from escalating to a $100,000 field defect, or a $1m+ catastrophe - Revised throughout, with new examples, and standards, including must have material on the new edition of global functional safety standard IEC 61508, which launches in 2010

The necessity of expertise for tackling the complicated and multidisciplinary issues of safety and risk has slowly permeated into all engineering applications so that risk analysis and management has gained a relevant role, both as a tool in support of plant design and as an indispensable means for emergency planning in accidental situations. This entails the acquisition of appropriate reliability modeling and risk analysis tools to complement the basic and specific engineering knowledge for the technological area of application.Aimed at providing an organic view of the subject, this book provides an introduction to the principal concepts and issues related to the safety of modern industrial activities. It also illustrates the classical techniques for reliability analysis and risk assessment used in current practice.

This graduate textbook imparts the fundamentals of reliability and risk that can be connected mathematically and applied to problems in engineering and medical science and practice. The book is divided into eight chapters, the first three of which deal with basic fundamentals of probability theory and reliability methods. The fourth chapter illustrates simulation methods needed to solve complex problems. Chapters 5-7 explain reliability codes and system reliability (which uses the component reliabilities discussed in previous chapters). The book concludes in chapter 8 with an examination of applications of reliability within engineering and medical fields. Presenting a highly relevant competency for graduates entering product research and development, or facilities operations sectors, this text includes many examples and end of chapter study questions to maximize student comprehension. Explains concepts of reliability and risk estimation techniques in the context of medicine and engineering; Elucidates the interplay between reliability and risk from design to operation phases; Uses real world examples from engineering structures and medical devices and protocols; Adopts a lucid yet rigorous presentation of reliability and risk calculations; Reinforces students understanding of concepts covered with end-of-chapter exercises.

Analysis of reliability and risk is an important and integral part of planning, construction and operation of all technical systems. To be able to perform such analyses systematically and scientifically, there is usually a need for special methods and models. This book presents the most important of these. Particular emphasis has been placed on the ideas and the motivation for the use of the various methods and models. It has been an objective to compile a book which provides practising engineers and engineering graduates with the concepts and basic techniques for evaluating reliability and risk. It is hoped that the material presented will make them so familiar with the subject that they can carry out various types of analyses themselves and understand and make use of the more detailed applications and additional material which is available in the journals and publications associated with their own discipline. It has also been an objective to put reliability and risk analyses in context - how such analyses should be used in design and operation of components and systems. The material presented is modern and a large part of the book is at research level. The book focuses on analysis of repairable systems, not only non-repairable systems which have traditionally been given most attention in textbooks on reliability theory. Since most real-life systems are repairable, methods for analysing repairable systems are an important area of research. The book presents general methods, with most applications taken from offshore petro leum activities.

Ernst G. Frankel This book has its origin in lecture notes developed over several years for use in a course in Systems Reliability for engineers concerned with the design of physical systems such as civil structures, power plants, and transport vehicles of all types. Increasing public concern with the reliability o~ systems for reasons of human safety, environmental protection, and acceptable ir. vestment risk limitations has resulted in an increasing interest by engineers in the formal applica~i0n of reliability theory to e~gineering desian. At the same time there is a demand for more effective approaches to the des~gn of procedures for the operation and use of man-made syste~s and more meaningful assessment of the risks intr)duction and use of such a system poses both when operating as designed and when operating at below design performance. The purpose of the book is to provide a sound, yet practical, introduction to reliability analysis and risk assessment which can be used by professionals in engineering, planning, management, and economics to improve the design, operation, and risk assessment of systems of interest. The text should be useful for students in many disciplines and is designed for fourth~year undergraduates or first-year graduate students. I would like to acknowledge the help of many of my graduate students who contributed to the development of this book by offering comments and criticism. Similarly I would like to thank Mrs.

“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 has been written with the intention to fill two big gaps in the reliability and risk literature: the risk-based reliability analysis as a powerful alternative to the traditional reliability analysis and the generic principles for reducing technical risk. An important theme in the book is the generic principles and techniques for reducing technical risk. These have been classified into three major categories: preventive (reducing the likelihood of failure), protective (reducing the consequences from failure) and dual (reducing both, the likelihood and the consequences from failure). Many of these principles (for example: avoiding clustering of events, deliberately introducing weak links, reducing sensitivity, introducing changes with opposite sign, etc.) are discussed in the reliability literature for the first time. Significant space has been allocated to component reliability. In the last chapter of the book, several applications are discussed of a powerful equation which constitutes the core of a new theory of locally initiated component failure by flaws whose number is a random variable. - Offers a shift in the existing paradigm for conducting reliability analyses - Covers risk-based reliability analysis and generic principles for reducing risk - Provides a new measure of risk based on the distribution of the potential losses from failure as well as the basic principles for risk-based design - Incorporates fast algorithms for system reliability analysis and discrete-event simulators - Includes the probability of failure of a structure with complex shape expressed with a simple equation

Tools to Proactively Predict Failure The prediction of failures involves uncertainty, and problems associated with failures are inherently probabilistic. Their solution requires optimal tools to analyze strength of evidence and understand failure events and processes to gauge confidence in a design’s reliability. Reliability Engineering and Risk Analysis: A Practical Guide, Second Edition has already introduced a generation of engineers to the practical methods and techniques used in reliability and risk studies applicable to numerous disciplines. Written for both practicing professionals and engineering students, this comprehensive overview of reliability and risk analysis techniques has been fully updated, expanded, and revised to meet current needs. It concentrates on reliability analysis of complex systems and their components and also presents basic risk analysis techniques. Since reliability analysis is a multi-disciplinary subject, the scope of this book applies to most engineering disciplines, and its content is primarily based on the materials used in undergraduate and graduate-level courses at the University of Maryland. This book has greatly benefited from its authors' industrial experience. It balances a mixture of basic theory and applications and presents a large number of examples to illustrate various technical subjects. A proven educational tool, this bestselling classic will serve anyone working on real-life failure analysis and prediction problems.