Reliability and optimal maintenance. (Q2498274)

The study of various maintenance policies and models in order to prevent the occurrence of system failure, and reduce maintenance costs is an important area in reliability engineering. Recently, several maintenance techniques have been developed due to the increased safety and reliability requirements of systems such as aircrafts, submarines, military systems and aerospace systems, and the increased complexity and rising costs of material and labour. This book presents such theories and methods with emphasis on the multi-component systems. It presents also topics of increased interest such as imperfect repair, economic dependence and opportunistic maintenance, and correlated failure and repair. Software reliability and maintenance cost, and warranty cost considerations are also included. The book is structured in 12 chapters. Chapter 1 provides an introduction to recent top topics in reliability and maintenance engineering. Chapter 2 summarizes significant approaches to model imperfect maintenance and dependence, chapter 3 overviews several theoretical and practical maintenance policies, and chapter 4 introduces a new modelling tool for imperfect maintenance. Chapter 5 investigates reliability and maintenance costs of series systems, while chapters 6, 7, and 8 discuss maintenance policies for multi-unit systems. Chapter 9 studies multi-state degraded systems, while chapter 10 discusses warranty cost models of repairable complex systems from the manufacturers' points of view. Chapter 11 models software reliability and testing costs and discusses optimal software testing and release policies. Finally, chapter 12 examines the use of Monte Carlo reliability simulation that may be used to assist decisions concerning the optimal maintenance policy of complex systems. The book may be considered as a state-of-the-art survey of reliability and maintenance theory and models. As such, it is well addressed to postgraduate students, researchers and practitioners in reliability and maintenance engineering, operations research, industrial and mechanical engineering, logistics management and statistics.