This book collects select chapters on modern industrial problems related to uncertainties and vagueness in the expert domain of knowledge. The book further provides the knowledge related to application of various mathematical and statistical tools in these areas. The results presented in the book help the researchers and scientists in handling complicated projects in their domains. Useful to industrialists, academicians, researchers and students alike, the book aims to help managers and technical specialists in designing and implementation of reliability and risk programs as below: Ensure the system safety and risk informed asset management Follow a proper strategy to maintain the mechanical components of the system Schedule the proper actions throughout the product life cycle Understand the structure and cost of a complex system Plan the proper schedule to improve the reliability and life of the system Identify unwanted failures and set up preventive and correction action

On behalf of the Organising Committee of the 11th ARTS I would like to welcome all the delegates, session chairpersons and authors. I particularly welcome new delegates, delegates from mainland Europe and from other countries. At the time of the last symposium, our tenth anniversary, we looked back on the growth of the symposium and the support it had received from so many people. Not least was the support given by Mrs Ruth Campbell who, between this symposium and the last, has retired from the National Centre of Systems Reliability. The Organising Committee would hereby like to acknowledge a very special debt of gratitude, over many years, to Ruth. Our gratitude also goes to Dr A. Z. Keller of the University of Bradford, the Organising Committee Chairman at the 10th Symposium, our President for 11th ARTS and, since the beginning, a staunch supporter of the ARTS. Our thanks go to Mme A. Camino of Electricite de France for being our after-dinner speaker and to Mr A. J. Bourne for being our keynote speaker. Their speeches have been keenly anticipated. Behind the symposium, the detailed and hard work of the administrative staff of the National Centre of Systems Reliability continues even after it has ended. Our thanks go to them, particularly, and to the Universities of Liverpool, Manchester Institute of Science and Technology and Bradford for their consistent support to the symposium.

Proceedings of the Ispra Course held at the Joint Research Centre, Ispra, Italy, November 16-19, 1987

This volume contains thirty-one papers presented at the Twelfth Scientific Meeting of the IFIP Working Group on Reliability and Optimization of Structural Systems which took place in Aalborg, Denmark, from May 22-25, 2005. The Working Group Conference was organized by the IFIP (International Federation for Information Processing) Working Group 7.5 of the Technical Committee on Modelling and Optimization. The purpose of the Working Group is to promote modern structural system reliability and optimization theory and its applications, to stimulate research, development and application of structural system reliability and optimization theory, to assist and advance research and development in these fields, to further the dissemination and exchange of information on reliability and optimization of structural systems, and to encourage education in structural system reliability and optimization theory.

Over the past 30 years, numerous concerns have been raised in the literature regarding the capability of static modeling approaches such as the event-tree (ET)/fault-tree (FT) methodology to adequately account for the impact of process/hardware/software/firmware/human interactions on nuclear power plant safety assessment, and methodologies to augment the ET/FT approach have been proposed. Often referred to as dynamic probabilistic risk/safety assessment (DPRA/DPSA) methodologies, which use a time-dependent phenomenological model of system evolution along with a model of its stochastic behavior to model for possible dependencies among failure events. The book contains a collection of papers that describe at existing plant level applicable DPRA/DPSA tools, as well as techniques that can be used to augment the ET/FT approach when needed.

A comprehensively updated and reorganized new edition. The updates include comparative methods for improving reliability; methods for optimal allocation of limited resources to achieve a maximum risk reduction; methods for improving reliability at no extra cost and building reliability networks for engineering systems. Includes: A unique set of 46 generic principles for reducing technical risk Monte Carlo simulation algorithms for improving reliability and reducing risk Methods for setting reliability requirements based on the cost of failure New reliability measures based on a minimal separation of random events on a time interval Overstress reliability integral for determining the time to failure caused by overstress failure modes A powerful equation for determining the probability of failure controlled by defects in loaded components with complex shape Comparative methods for improving reliability which do not require reliability data Optimal allocation of limited resources to achieve a maximum risk reduction Improving system reliability based solely on a permutation of interchangeable components

Business industries depend on advanced models and tools that provide an optimal and objective decision-making process, ultimately guaranteeing improved competitiveness, reducing risk, and eliminating uncertainty. Thanks in part to the digital era of the modern world, reducing these conditions has become much more manageable. Advanced Models and Tools for Effective Decision Making Under Uncertainty and Risk Contexts provides research exploring the theoretical and practical aspects of effective decision making based not only on mathematical techniques, but also on those technological tools that are available nowadays in the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Featuring coverage on a broad range of topics such as industrial informatics, knowledge management, and production planning, this book is ideally designed for decision makers, researchers, engineers, academicians, and students.

ADVANCED TECHNIQUES FOR MAINTENANCE MODELING AND RELIABILITY ANALYSIS OF REPAIRABLE SYSTEMS This book covers advanced models and methodologies for reliability analysis of large, complex, and critical repairable systems that undergo imperfect maintenance actions in industries having MRO facilities and also covers real-life examples from the field of aviation. The content presented in this book is inspired by the existing limitations of the generalized renewal process (GRP) model and the problems confronted by the maintenance, repair, and operations (MRO) facilities in industries dealing with large and complex repairable systems. Through this book, the authors have attempted to equip the MRO facilities with more advanced scientific tools and techniques by addressing various limitations related to the reliability analysis of repairable systems. The book is dedicated to various imperfect maintenance-based virtual age models and methodologies to bridge various research gaps present in the available literature. A summary of deliverables is as follows: Presents the basic concepts of maintenance and provides a virtual age model that can accommodate all maintenance; Provides the basic concepts of censoring in repairable systems along with the concept of black box and failure modes. Also highlighted is how the proposed work will be useful for industries conducting failure modes and effect analysis (FMEA) and estimating the mean residual life (MRL) of repairable systems; Presents methodology that applies risk-based threshold on intensity function and provides a threshold to declare the system/component as high failure rate components (HFRCs); Identifying a system as HFRCs is an important task, but for an industry dealing with critical systems, preventing the system from being HFRC is more important, since the risk involved in such systems would be very high. Thus, the book presents a progressive maintenance policy (PMP) for repairable systems; Focusses on qualitative analysis of repair quality. Assuming repair quality as a subjective variable, the authors have presented various factors that affect the repair quality most and modeled their interdependency using Bayesian networks (BN). Audience Professional reliability engineers, reliability administrators, consultants, managers, and post-graduate students in engineering schools. The book belongs to any engineering, technical, and academic institution concerned with manufacturing, production, aviation, defense, and software industries.