Recent Advances in Reliability Theory, Softcover reprint of the original 1st ed. 2000 Methodology, Practice, and Inference Statistics for Industry and Technology Series

Conceiving reliablesystems is a strategic issue for any industrial society. Hence, reliability has become a discipline at the beginning of the Second World War. In fact, reliability is a field of reseach common to mathematics, operational research, informatics, graph theory, physics, and so forth. We are concerned here with the mathematical side of reliability, of which probability, statistics, and more specially stochastic processes theory constitute the natural basis. US army during the war, and later in the US Problems encountered by the and Soviet space programs, have led to an awarenessofthe need for reliabilityor more generaly for dependability (a general term covering reliability, availability, security, maintainability, etc.) of the systems. The paper by W. Weibull of 1938 on the strength of materials, leading to the distribution that later took his name, and the paper by B. Epstein and M. Sobel of 1951, initiating the use of the exponential distribution as the basic (and now most used) model for reliability, are the founding papers of the field. At this time, the systems were merely seen as black boxes. During the 1960s, they began to be considered as the result of the interaction of their elements. Appropriate methods were then developed, from Shannon's work to the beautiful theory of coherent systems initiated by Z.W. Birnbaum, J.D.

1 Reliability: Past, Present, Future.- 2 Reliability Analysis as a Tool for Expressing and Communicating Uncertainty.- 3 Modeling a Process of Non-Ideal Repair.- 4 Some Models and Mathematical Results for Reliability of Systems of Components.- 5 Algorithms of Stochastic Activity and Problems of Reliability.- 6 Some Shifted Stochastic Orders.- 7 Characterization of Distributions in Reliability.- 8 Asymptotic Analysis of Reliability for Switching Systems in Light and Heavy Traffic Conditions.- 9 Nonlinearly Perturbed Markov Chains and Large Deviations for Lifetime Functionals.- 10 Evolutionary Systems in an Asymptotic Split Phase Space.- 11 An Asymptotic Approach to Multistate Systems Reliability Evaluation.- 12 Computer Intensive Methods Based on Resampling in Analysis of Reliability and Survival Data.- 13 Statistical Analysis of Damage Processes.- 14 Data Analysis Based on Warranty Database.- 15 Failure Models Indexed by Time and Usage.- 16 A New Multiple Proof Loads Approach For Estimating Correlations.- 17 Conditional and Partial Correlation For Graphical Uncertainty Models.- 18 Semiparametric Methods of Time Scale Selection.- 19 Censored and Truncated Lifetime Data.- 20 Tests for a Family of Survival Models Based on Extremes.- 21 Software Reliability Models - Past, Present and Future.- 22 Dynamic Analysis of Failures in Repairable Systems and Software.- 23 Precedence Test and Maximal Precedence Test.- 24 Hierarchical Bayesian Inference in Related Reliability Experiments.- 25 Tests for Equality of Intensities of Failures of a Repairable System Under Two Competing Risks.- 26 Semiparametric Estimation in Accelerated Life Testing.- 27 A Theoretical Framework for Accelerated Testing.- 28 Unbiased Estimation in Reliability and Similar Problems.- 29 Prediction Under Association.- 30 Uniform Limit Laws for Kernel Density Estimators on Possibly Unbounded Intervals.- 31 A Weak Convergence Result Relevant in Recurrent and Renewal Models.