Reliability, Maintainability and Risk : Practical Methods for Engineers Including Reliability Centred Maintenance and Safety-Related Systems

Reliability, Maintainability and Risk: Practical Methods for Engineers, Eighth Edition, discusses tools and techniques for reliable and safe engineering, and for optimizing maintenance strategies. It emphasizes the importance of using reliability techniques to identify and eliminate potential failures early in the design cycle. The focus is on techniques known as RAMS (reliability, availability, maintainability, and safety-integrity).

The book is organized into five parts. Part 1 on reliability parameters and costs traces the history of reliability and safety technology and presents a cost-effective approach to quality, reliability, and safety. Part 2 deals with the interpretation of failure rates, while Part 3 focuses on the prediction of reliability and risk. Part 4 discusses design and assurance techniques; review and testing techniques; reliability growth modeling; field data collection and feedback; predicting and demonstrating repair times; quantified reliability maintenance; and systematic failures. Part 5 deals with legal, management and safety issues, such as project management, product liability, and safety legislation.

• 8th edition of this core reference for engineers who deal with the design or operation of any safety critical systems, processes or operations
• Answers the question: how can a defect that costs less than $1000 dollars to identify at the process design stage be prevented from escalating to a $100,000 field defect, or a $1m+ catastrophe
• Revised throughout, with new examples, and standards, including must have material on the new edition of global functional safety standard IEC 61508, which launches in 2010

Dr. David J. Smith is the Proprietor of Technis Consultancy. He has written numerous books on Reliability and Safety over the last 40 years. His FARADIP database has become widely used, and his other software packages are also used throughout the profession. His PhD thesis was on the subject of reliability prediction and common cause failure. He contributed to the first drafting of IEC 61508 and chairs the IGEM panel which produces SR/15 (the gas industry safety related guidance). David is past President of the Safety and Reliability Society.