Reliability Engineering

1Reliability Engineering in the Twenty-First Century

Institutional and individual customers have increasingly better and broader awareness of products (and services) and are increasingly making smarter choices in their purchases. In fact, because society as a whole continues to become more knowledgeable of product performance, quality, reliability, and cost, these attributes are considered to be market differentiators.

People are responsible for designing, manufacturing, testing, maintaining, and disposing of the products that we use in daily life. Perhaps you may agree with Neville Lewis, who wrote, “Systems do not fail, parts and materials do not fail—people fail!” (Lewis 2003) It is the responsibility of people to have the knowledge and skills to develop products that function in an acceptably reliable manner. These concepts highlight the purpose of this book: to provide the understanding and methodologies to efficiently and cost effectively develop reliable products and to assess and manage the operational availability of complex products, processes, and systems.

This chapter presents the basic definitions of reliability and discusses the rela­tionship between quality, reliability, and performance. Consequences of having an unreliable product are then presented. The chapter concludes with a discussion of supplier–customer reliability objectives and responsibilities.

1.1 What Is Quality?

The word quality comes from the Latin qualis, meaning “how constituted.” Dictionaries define ...