Reliability, Maintainability and Risk, 8th Edition

Chapter 9. Quantifying the Reliability Models

9.1. The Reliability Prediction Method

This section summarizes how the methods described in Chapters 7 and 8 are brought together to quantify RAMS, and Figure 9.1 gives an overall picture of the prediction process. It has already been emphasized that each specific system failure mode has to be addressed separately and thus targets are required for each mode (‘top event’ in fault tree terminology). Reliability prediction requires the choice of suitable failure rate data, which has been dealt with in detail in Chapter 4. Down times also need to be assessed and it will be shown, in Section 9.2, how repair times and diagnostic intervals both contribute to down time. The probability of human error (Section ...