........ published in NEWSLETTER # 60
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........ published in NEWSLETTER # 60
RELIABILITY AND MAINTENANCE OF COMPLEX SYSTEMS
by Professor S. Ozekici, Bogazici University, Istanbul (Turkey)
Technological developments in recent decades have prompted the design and production of devices with many components which are substantially more complex in structure than their earlier versions. Computers, telecommunication devices, airplanes and manufacturing robots are only a few examples. Such high technology devices are generally quite expensive and critical in the functioning of the system they are installed in; thus, it is of utmost importance that they should be highly reliable in design and properly maintained to achieve an extended economically useful lifetime. These words reflect the main theme of the NATO Advanced Study Institute (ASI) on "Current Issues and Challenges in the Reliability and Maintenance of Complex Systems".
This volume (NATO ASI SERIES F154) contains edited versions of the lecture notes as well as additional selected contributions from some of the participants. It is intended to serve as a graduate level textbook as well as a reference book for scientists and academics whose research interests coincide with the theme of the meeting. The book consists of a carefully blended mixture of 28 chapters organized in five complementary parts covering a wide range of topics related to reliability and maintenance, from the theoretical aspects of stochastic modelling to the very practical issues in maintenance management.
Part I concentrates on stochastic models of reliability and maintenance. It provides an overview and discusses some of the recent research on stochastic models of fatigue crack growth, physics of failure, dynamic modelling of reliability systems, reliability analysis via corrections and age-based failure modelling.
The main theme of Part II is the maintenance of complex systems. The emphasis is on decision and optimization models for such devices. Discussions focus on the use of random environments and the intrinsic aging concept in complex systems, frameworks for maintenance activities, the marginal cost approach, availability analysis and optimization of monotone systems, determination of maintenance frequencies and burn-in design problems for heterogeneous populations.
Part III concerns stochastic methods in software engineering. It provides overviews of software reliability engineering and assessment, discusses the operational profile, and addresses important issues in the analysis of software failure data as well as decision methods regarding optimal testing of software.
Part IV concerns computational methods and simulation in reliability and maintenance. Simulation is a technique that is widely used in many fields such as queueing, telecommunication and computer science, but its application in reliability and maintenance is often overlooked. In addition to basic topics in simulation, this section discusses some analytical computational techniques and algorithms for complex Markovian systems along with the use of efficient techniques for estimating, via simulation, transient measures of highly dependable non-Markovian systems.
Finally, Part V ends our treatment with maintenance management systems. Apart from case studies of optimization; actual decision support systems, their development, models, user interfaces and applications are also discussed. Important elements of maintenance management systems are presented followed by discussions on a decision support system for opportunistic preventive maintenance and optimization with the delay time model.
Reference books: F114, F120, F154