TABLE OF CONTENTS Reliability theory has grown out of the valuable experiences from many defects of military systems in World War II and with the development of modern technology. For the purpose of making good products with high quality and designing highly reliable systems, the importance of reliability has been increasing greatly with the innovation of recent technology. The theory has been actually applied to not only industrial, mechanical, and electronic engineering but also to computer, information, and communication engineering. Many researchers have investigated statistically and stochastically complex phenomena of real systems to improve their reliability.
Recently, many serious accidents have happened in the world where systems have been large-scale and complex, and they not only caused heavy damage and a social sense of instability, but also brought an unrecoverable bad influence on the living environment. These are said to have occurred from various sources of equipment deterioration and maintenance reduction due to a policy of industrial rationalization and personnel cuts.
Anyone may worry that big earthquakes in the near future might happen in Japan and might destroy large old plants such as chemical and power plants, and as a result, inflict serious damage to large areas.
Most industries at present restrain themselves from making investments in new plants and try to run current plants safely and efficiently as long as possible. Furthermore, advanced nations have almost finished public infrastructure and will now rush into a maintenance period [1]. From now on, maintenance will be more important than redundancy, production,...
