An Introduction to Reliability and Risk Assessment 3

of the increase in complexity of modern systems the reliability of such

devices is still significantly below 100 per cent.
The American armed forces took an increasing interest in
reliability and its measurement in the Second World War because the
unreliability of vital equipment and systems was causing significant
problems. In the Korean War the unreliability of electronic equipment
was reported as costing $2/year to maintain each dollar's worth of
equipment, hi the UK at this time it was also noted that the lack of
reliability and maintainability of equipment was forcing the armed
services to spend over half of its resources on maintenance rather than
operations.
Arising from this appreciation of the importance of reliability and
maintainability a series of US Department of Defense Standards
(MIL-STDs) were introduced and implemented. Subsequently the UK
Ministry of Defence also introduced similar standards. By and large
their introduction has significantly improved the reliability and
maintainability of military equipment and systems.
Reliability methods have also been introduced into the process
industries. Here the objectives are to improve the safety and
availability of new and existing plant. The technology of reliability
has benefited significantly from this interest and the concepts of
unrevealed failures and techniques, such as fault trees, Markov and
human reliability analysis, have found many applications in process
plant assessment.

1.3 Reliability terminology

In this section some of the terminology and expressions used in
reliability assessment are defined. A more detailed discussion of these
concepts is given in Chapter 5.

1.3.1 Reliability
Quantitative reliability can be defined as:

'the probability that an item (component, equipment, or system)

will operate without failure for a stated period of time under
specified conditions'.

Reliability is therefore a measure of the probability of successful

performance of the system over a period of time. Reliability
assessment is initially carried out for systems of components which