To ensure product reliability, an organization must follow specific practices during the product development process that impact reliability. The second edition of the bestselling Product Reliability, Maintainability, and Supportability Handbook helps professionals identify the shortcomings in the reliability practices of their organizations and empowers them to take actions to overcome them. The book begins by discussing product effectiveness and its related functions, presents the mathematical theory for reliability, and introduces statistical inference concepts as ways to analyze probabilistic models from observational data. Later chapters introduce basic types of probability distributions; present the concepts of confidence interval; focus on reliability assessment; and examine software reliability, quality, and safety. Use FMMEA to identify failure mechanisms Reflecting the latest developments in the field, the book introduces a new methodology known as failure modes, mechanisms, and effects analysis (FMMEA) to identify potential failure mechanisms.
Shifting to a practical stance, the book delineates steps that must be taken to develop a product that meets reliability objectives. It describes how to combine reliability information from parts and subsystems to compute system level reliability, presents methods for evaluating reliability in fault-tolerant conditions, and describes methods for modeling and analyzing failures of repairable products. The text discusses reliability growth, accelerated testing, and management of a continuous improvement program; analyzes the influence of reliability on logistics support requirements; shows how to assess overall product effectiveness; and introduces the concepts of process capability and statistical process control techniques. New Topics in the Second Edition Include: Failure Modes, Mechanisms, and Effects Analysis Confidence Interval on Reliability Metrics and their Relationships with Measures of Product Quality Process Control and Process Capability and their Relationship with Product Reliability System Reliability, including Redundancy