Quality and Reliability of Technical Systems: Theory, Practice and Management

English (translation)Original German

This book shows how to build in, evaluate, and demonstrate reliability & availability of components, equipment, systems. It presents the state-of-the-art of reliability engineering, both in theory and practice, and is based on the author's 30 years experience in this field, half in industry and half as Professor of Reliability Engineering at the ETH, Zurich. The structure of the book allows rapid access to practical results. Besides extensions to cost models and approximate expressions, new in this edition are investigations on common cause failures, phased-mission systems, availability demonstration and estimation, confidence limits at system level, trend tests for early failures or wearout, as well as a review of maintenance strategies, an introduction to Petri nets & dynamic FTA, and a set of problems for home-work. Methods and tools are given in a way that they can be tailored to cover different reliability requirement levels and be used for safety analysis as well. This book is a textbook establishing a link between theory and practice, with a large number of tables, figures, and examples to support the practical aspects.

From a book review to 4th Ed. (Rel. Newsletter, Aug. 2004): All in all, Professor Birolini has given readers an excellent instructional tool and desktop reference. It is extremely well written. The span of topics makes the coverage of some topics necessarily brief. Professor Birolini presents much of the non-statistical information in a manner that could be understood easily by engineering and program managers as well as reliability experts. He discusses the statistical topics in the proper amount of detail to ensure at least a good basic understanding. Tables, illustrations, and examples amply support the text.
Kenneth P. LaSala, Ph.D.