Reliability Engineering and System Safety 77 (2002) 207208

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Book Review
Reliability engineering and risk analysis: a practical guide M. Modarres, M. Kaminskiy and V. Kritsov, Marcel Dekker Inc., New York, 1999, 542 pages This book deals with the techniques of reliability analysis, adopting the perspective of their application to problem solving. It is therefore specially suited for practicing engineers, although it can also be used as a textbook especially at undergraduate level. The book explains the methods and techniques used in reliability analysis, discussing their use and limitations but avoiding the more theoretical aspects and the derivations of the results. Chapter 1 denes reliability, availability and risk analysis and Chapter 2 reviews the main aspects of probability and statistics that are essential to the understanding of the book and the application of the methods. It introduces the basic aspects of probability and of Boolean algebra. It then presents the main probability distributions, both discrete (binomial, hypergeometric, Poisson and geometric) and continuous (normal, lognormal, exponential, Weibull, Gamma and beta). It also includes estimation and hypothesis testing, tests of goodness-of-t, regression analysis and algebra of random variables. Chapter 3, Elements of Component Reliability, describes methods to quantify the reliability of replaceable components, i.e. of non-repairable components. The methods presented build in the material presented in Chapter 2 as they are very much centred in statistical methods to analyse eld data, yielding predictions of component reliability. It studies various functions that describe the reliability of a component, such as mean time to failure, failure rate and reliability function and presents the expressions for these functions for the various probability density functions considered in the previous chapter. It discusses how to estimate the parameters of the distributions from the eld data dealing with graphical procedures, with classical parametric estimation (with censoring), with non-parametric estimation and with Bayesian estimation. Chapter 4, System Reliability Analysis, deals with methods of combining the information about each of the components to produce estimates of reliability of the system made of non-repairable components. It presents the methods of reliability block diagram, of fault tree and success tree, of event tree, of master logic diagram and FMEA/FMECA. In general the basic idea of each method is introduced and exemplied with simple cases, with the reader being
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referred to commercial computer programs to be able to solve more realistic problems. Chapter 5 deals with systems that are made of repairable components. In this case it is no longer the reliability of the system that is the important descriptive parameter but its availability, which is the main topic of this chapter. It starts to introduce probabilistic models and statistical methods that are used to determine the failure characteristics of repairable components. The homogeneous and non-homogeneous Poisson processes are introduced and methods to determine the rate of occurrence of failures (ROCOF) are discussed. A very brief introduction is also included about the use of Markovian methods to determine system availability. Chapters 6 and 7 discuss several topics that are of interest to reliability engineering, although neither in any specic sequence nor with one objective specically stated except providing a set of useful additional information. The various selected topics that are included after this chapter include a very brief and unsatisfactory discussion of stressstrength analysis, and references to software reliability analysis, human reliability, reliability centred maintenance and reliability growth. Importance measures are also discussed in a section, which although not being very extensive, is a good overview. The other chapter of selected topics is focused on data analysis and discusses accelerated life testing, analysis of dependent failures, uncertainty analysis, expert opinion and probabilistic failure analysis. Chapter 8 deals with Risk Analysis and this can be considered the weakest part of the book. If the book was only addressing Reliability Engineering the chapter on risk analysis could be considered an adequate coverage of a special topic in the same spirit as the other topics included in Chapters 6 and 7. However, having Risk Analysis in the title of the book, the reader is certainly disappointed by the limited coverage of the topic, which occupies no more than about 40 pages from the 540 pages of the book. The appendices include some statistical tables and some generic failure data. They also list some of the available commercial software that may be considered to analyse complex systems and provide a user manual for simple software that is supplied with the book to perform some elementary calculations. Overall the book can be considered to achieve its objectives and to be an excellent book to introduce the methods of reliability engineering to practitioners and to students dealing with this subject for the rst time. The essential methods are explained, examples help to show how to apply the

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Book Review / Reliability Engineering and System Safety 77 (2002) 207208

methods and exercises can be used to conrm that the material has been absorbed. The presentation is, in general, clear and to the point, not being unnecessarily complicated with theoretical aspects or mathematical derivations of different expressions. The selected topics are generally interesting introductions to some related subjects that may raise the curiosity of the reader to further reading. Risk analysis is only covered briey and more justice would be made if it were not part of the title and simply one more selected topic of which a brief introduction was given.

For the readers that are interested in reliability engineering, especially in analysing cases and solving problems this book is recommended as a very good one. Carlos Guedes Soares* Technical University of Lisbon, Instituto Superior Tecnico, Av. Rovisco Pais, 1049-001 Lisboa, Portugal E-mail address: guedess@alfa.ist.utl.pt

* Tel.: 1351-21-841-7607; fax: 1351-21-847-4015.