Overview

Loss prevention is in large part the application of probabilistic methods to the problems of failure in the process industries. The discipline which is concerned with the probabilistic treatment of failure in systems in general is reliability engineering. This chapter gives an account of reliability engineering and of some reliability techniques.

Selected references on reliability engineering are given in Table 7.1. There are numerous books on the subject. These include Reliability Theory and Practice (Bazovsky, 1961), Reliability Principles and Practices (Calabro, 1962), Reliability: Management, Methods and Mathematics (Lloyd and Lipow, 1962), System Reliability Engineering (Sandler, 1963), Reliability Engineering (von Alven, 1964), Reliability Engineering for Electronic Systems (Myers et al., 1964), Mathematical Theory of Reliability (Barlow and Proschan, 1965), Probabilistic Reliability: An Engineering Approach (Shooman, 1968a), Probabilistic Systems Analysis (Breipohl, 1970), Mechanical Reliability (A.D.S. Carter, 1972; 2nd edn, 1986), Reliability Technology (A.E. Green and Bourne, 1972), Reliability, Maintainability and Availability Assessment (Locks, 1973), Reliability Engineering in Design (Kapur and Lamberson, 1977), Engineering Reliability (Dhillon and Singh, 1981), Practical Reliability Engineering (O Connor, 1981; 2nd edn, 1984), Reliability and Maintainability in Perspective (D.J. Smith, 1988) Reliability, Maintainability and Risk (D.J. Smith, 1991), Reliability Analysis and Prediction (Misra, 1992), Reliability and Risk (Andrews and Moss, 1993), The Reliability Availability and Productiveness of Systems (Sherwinand Bossche, 1993) and New Trends in System Reliability Evaluation (Misra, 1994). It is intended that the material...