The necessity of expertise for tackling the complicated and multidisciplinary issues of reliability and risk analysis has slowly permeated into all engineering applications, with risk analysis and management gaining a relevant role both as a tool in support of plant design and operation, and as an indispensable means for emergency planning in accidental situations.

Failure is an unavoidable phenomenon in all technological products and systems. From the scientific and engineering point of view, the investigation of the uncertain and 'obscure' domain of failures entails the exploration of the functional and physical limits of systems, in an effort to understand how, why and when a device may not function properly. In this respect, the required approach is complementary to the traditional engineering viewpoint which focuses on how and when a machine functions in an optimal way.

Whatever particular failure one is considering, proper control and management of it become essential. Areas of application which involve failure-oriented and failure-driven aspects are Reliability, Availability, Maintainability, Safety (RAMS), Risk, Quality control (QC), Fault Detection and Identification (FDI), security and others. As such, failure analysis presents a strong connotation of multi-disciplinarity which significantly adds to its inherent difficulty. Hence, these failure-oriented disciplines have become more and more important and closely connected so as to require an integrated view. This entails the acquisition of appropriate modeling and analysis tools as complement to the basic and specific engineering knowledge for the technological area of application.

The present lecture notes draw from the specialized literature to address the...