book companion site. To use a specific program, you need to study the user manual. This book should help you understand the content of such manuals and the sources of uncertainty of the results produced.
A wide range of theories and methods have been developed for system reliability analysis. All these cannot be covered in an introductory text. When selecting material to cover, we have focused on methods that:
Are commonly used in industry or in other relevant application areas
Give the analyst insights that increase her understanding of the system (such that system weaknesses can be identified at an early stage of the analysis)
Provide the analyst with genuine insight into system behavior
Can be used for hand‐calculation (at least for small systems)
Can be explained rather easily to, and be understood by nonreliability engineers and managers.
The authors have mainly been engaged in applications related to the offshore oil and gas industry and many examples therefore come from this industry. The methods described and many of the examples are equally suitable for other industries and application areas.
Authors
The first edition of the book (Høyland and Rausand 1994) was written with joint efforts from Arnljot Høyland and Marvin Rausand. Arnljot sorrily passed away in 2002. The second edition (Rausand and Høyland 2004), was therefore prepared by Marvin alone and represented a major update of the first edition. Marvin retired from his professorship at NTNU in 2015 and when Wiley wanted an updated version, he asked Anne Barros to help preparing this third edition. Due to unforeseen practical constraints, Anne could not devote as much time to this project as she wanted. Anne's contribution to this edition is mainly related to Chapters 11 and 12, the end of chapter problems, in addition to reviewing and proposing improvements to other chapters.
Acknowledgments
First of all, we express our deepest thanks to Professor Arnljot Høyland. Professor Høyland passed away in December 2002, 78 years old, and could not participate in writing any further editions of the book. We hope that he would have approved and appreciated the changes and additions we have made.
The authors sincerely thank a high number of students at NTNU, and lecturers and students at many other universities around the world for comments to the previous edition and for suggesting improvements. We have done our best to implement these suggestions. Special thanks go to Professor Bruno Castanier, Université d'Angers, for making significant contributions to Section 12.3, and to Per Hokstad, SINTEF, for many inputs to Chapter 8.
Many definitions used in the book are from, or are inspired by, the International Electrotechnical Vocabulary (IEV) www.electropedia.org. We appreciate the initiative of the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) to make this vocabulary freely available. References to the vocabulary are given in the text as the IEV ref. number (e.g. IEV 192‐01‐24 for the term reliability).
Last, but not least, we are grateful to the editorial and production staff at John Wiley & Sons for their careful, effective, and professional work. In particular, we would like to thank our main contacts in the final stages of preparing the book, Sarah Keegan, Kathleen Santoloci, and Viniprammia Premkumar.
Trondheim, 2020
Marvin Rausand and Anne Barros
References
1 Høyland, A. and Rausand, M. (1994). System Reliability Theory: Models and Statistical Methods. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.
2 Rausand, M. and Høyland, A. (2004). System Reliability Theory: Models, Statistical Methods, and Applications, 2e. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.
About the Companion Website
System Reliability Theory: Models, Statistical Methods, and Applications is accompanied by a companion website:
www.wiley.com/go/SystemReliabilityTheory3e
The book companion site is split into two sub-sites hosted by Wiley:
1 An open site that is accessible to all users of the book.
2 An instructor site for instructors/lecturers (i.e. not accessible for students and general readers of the book).
The two sites contain a number of PDF files. These files have version numbers and will be updated when required.
In addition to these two sites hosted by Wiley, we will maintain a GitHub site for the book.
Open Site
The open site contains:
1 A supplement to the book with comments to chapters, suggestions for further reading, and general information about the subject area.
2 Slides to the various chapters (made with LaTeX/Beamer).
3 Control questions to each chapter.
4 Errata (list of misprints and minor errors – a more frequently updated errata list may be found on the book's GitHub site).
Instructor Site
The instructor site contains:
1 Solutions to end of chapter problems.
2 Suggested lecturing plans (what to cover, which problems to use, etc.).
3 Additional problems with solutions.
4 FAQ list.
GitHub Site
The GitHub site is open to all users – and should have a clear link from the Wiley sites. The GitHub site will contain:
1 A brief description of the book.
2 Detailed R-scripts related to the book.
3 Detailed Python-scripts related to the book.
4 Errata list (see above under Open site).
5 FAQ related to the book – with our answers/comments.
The URL of the GitHub site is https://github.com/RausandBarros/ReliabilityBookScripts
Contact Person
The contact person for the book companion site and the GitHub site is Anne Barros ([email protected])
1 Introduction
1.1 What is Reliability?
Nowadays, nearly all of us depend on a wide range of technical products and services in our everyday life. We expect our electrical appliances, cars, computers, mobile phones, and so on, to function when we need them, and to be reliable for a rather long time. We expect services, such as electricity, computer networks, and transport,