Reliability, Maintainability, and Supportability: Best Practices for Systems Engineers

Foreword

PURPOSE AND RATIONALE

Students and professionals have many choices of text and reference books for the sustainability engineering disciplines: reliability, maintainability, and supportability. Available books range from theoretical treatises on the mathematical theory of reliability, applied maintainability and logistics modeling, studies in reliability physics, and books devoted to systems management. But there’s still something missing: there is a need for an exposition of the sustainability engineering activities that systems engineers need to carry out, which explains the purposes and benefits of the activities without necessarily explaining how to do them all in detail. This book fills that need.

Several decades of experience in sustainability engineering and management in the telecommunications industry and additional experience in research and teaching have led me to these relevant observations.

1. Few publications in the sustainability disciplines focus on the core systems engineering tasks of creating, managing, and tracking requirements for these disciplines specifically.
2. The small number of degree-granting programs in sustainability engineering means that many systems engineers have no exposure to these ideas until they are assigned to deal with them in the work environment.
3. The gap between what is known and available in the research literature and what is routinely practiced in day-to-day sustainability engineering is large and growing. Many sustainability ...