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For both the manufacturer and the purchaser, reliability is one of the most important
characteristics defining the quality of a product or system. High reliability is
achieved through design efforts, choice of materials and other inputs, production,
quality assurance efforts, proper maintenance, and many related decisions and activities,
all of which add to the costs of production, purchase, and product ownership.
On the other hand, lack of reliability can also lead to significant costs. Loss of
revenue due to grounding of a wide-body commercial aircraft may be substantial. In
the case of breakdown of a large production facility, revenue loss can amount to
millions of dollars per day. Failure of a spacecraft can result in the loss of tens or
hundreds of millions of dollars. Failure of a medical device can result in injury or
death of a patient and can have serious legal implications. A recall by an automobile
manufacturer can cost tens of millions of dollars.
Efforts at achieving high reliability involve many disciplines—engineering, mathematics,
materials science, operations analysis, statistics, computer science, and so
forth. A scientific approach to reliability theory and methods began during and subsequent
to World War II. Since then, the discipline has developed rapidly and much
literature addresses this area, including more than a hundred books on general reliability,
many more on specific issues (design and testing, materials science, and so
forth), scores of journals, and numerous conferences each year.
The notion of a book on case studies originated during the preparation of our
previous book in this area, Reliability: Modeling, Prediction, and Optimization (Wiley,
2000). That book included an early chapter devoted to brief descriptions of reliability
applications, along with associated data sets taken from the engineering, reliability,
and statistical literature—in essence, the input for small case studies. These
were used throughout the book both to motivate and to illustrate the reliability and
statistical methodologies presented. In developing this approach, it occurred to us
that a book of fully developed case studies in reliability would be a most useful addition
to the literature, for the same reasons. As we began work on the casebook
project, this soon expanded to include maintenance and maintainability as well. |
