Failure rate modeling for reliability and risk (Q947474)

The failure rate is one of the crucial probabilistic characteristics for a number of disciplines including reliability, survival analysis, risk analysis and demography. This book focuses on reliability theory and, specifically, on failure rate modeling and its generalizations, on systems operating in a random environment and on repairable systems. It presents a systematic study of the failure rate and related indices, and covers a number of important applications where the failure rate plays the major role. Applications in engineering systems are studied, together with some actuarial, biological and demographic examples. Organized in 10 chapters, the book provides a survey of its broad and interdisciplinary subject invaluable to researchers and advanced students in reliability engineering and applied statistics, as well as to demographers, econometricians, actuaries and many other mathematically oriented researchers. The first chapter covers the aim and scope of the book including a brief overview of its content. Chapter 2 is devoted to reliability basics and can be viewed as a brief introduction to some reliability notions and results, while Chapter 3 deals with generalizations of the main exponential formula of reliability and survival analysis. Chapter 4 presents a brief introduction to the theory of point processes that is necessary for considering models of repairable systems, while Chapter 5 is devoted to repairable systems with imperfect repair. Chapter 6 provides a comprehensive treatment of mixture failure rate modeling in reliability analysis, while Chapter 7 presents the asymptotic theory for mixture failure rates. Chapter 8 deals with several specific problems where the failure rate can be obtained directly as an exact or approximate relationship, while Chapter 9 is devoted to software reliability modeling, and specifically to a discussion of the software failure rate models. Finally, Chapter 10 is focused on demographic and biological applications of reliability-based reasoning.