1 Introduction

1.1 Background

In a modern society, professional engineers and technical managers are

responsible for the planning, design, manufacture and operation of
products and systems ranging from simple products to complex systems.
The failure of these can often cause effects that range from inconvenience
and irritation to a severe impact on society and on its environment.
Users, customers and society in general expect that products and systems
are reliable and safe. The question that arises is, 'How reliable or how
safe will the system be during its future operating life?' This question can
be answered, in part, by the use of quantitative reliability evaluation. In
consequence a considerable awareness has developed in the application
of such techniques to the design and operation of simple and complex
systems together with an increasing amount of legal requirements,
including product liability aspects and statutory directives. This book is
primarily concerned with describing a wide range of reliability evaluation
techniques and their application. However, it is first beneficial to discuss
some of the issues and philosophy that relate to reliability in order to put
these techniques into perspective and to identify the background from
which the various techniques and measures have evolved, as well as to
show why the techniques have been developed.
The development of reliability evaluation techniques was initially
associated with the aerospace industry and military applications. These
developments were followed rapidly by applications in the nuclear
industry, which is now under extreme pressure to ensure safe and reliable
nuclear reactors; in the electricity supply, which is expected to supply
energy on demand without local failures or large-scale blackouts; and in
continuous process plants such as steel plants and chemical plants, which
can suffer large-scale losses and idling if system failures occur, as well as
causing deaths and environmental pollution. All of these areas have
suffered severe problems in recent times. These include aerospace
(Challenger space shuttle, 1986; several commercial aircraft accidents),
nuclear (Three Mile Island, 1979; Chernobyl, 1986), electricity supply
(New York blackout, 1977), process plant (Flixborough, 1974; Seveso,

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R. Billinton et al., Reliability Evaluation of Engineering Systems
© Springer Science+Business Media New York 1992
2 Reliability evaluation of engineering systems

1976; Bhopal, 1984), and many others, in which failures have resulted in
severe social and environmental consequences and many deaths.
These events have considerably increased pressure to objectively assess
reliability, safety and overall probabilistic risk. Unfortunately risk per-
ceived by the general public is often weighted by emotion, which leaves
certain sectors of industry, particularly the nuclear, in an invidious
position. Society generally has great difficulty in distinguishing between a
hazard, which can be ranked in terms of its severity but does not take
into account its likelihood, and risk, which accounts not only for the
hazardous events but also for their likelihood. Reliability evaluation
techniques can assist in the objective of assessment of these probabilistic
risks and help to account, not only for severity, but also for likelihood.
Modem reliability evaluation techniques are also used in a much wider
range of applications including domestic appliances, automobiles and
other products that individually have little socioeconomic effect when
they fail. Recent trends in both North America and the European
Community are increasing the need to conduct risk and reliability
assessments. These trends centre on the changing laws relating to product
liability in which suppliers, designers and manufacturers are being made
responsible for losses and injuries to customers due to product defects.
Also directives are being issued by governments and regulatory bodies
that relate to adequacy, safety and risk and which involve the consequen-
tial need for objectively assessing probabilistic risk and reliability.
It is evident from this discussion that all engineers should have some
awareness of the basic concepts associated with the application of
reliability evaluation techniques.

1.2 Types of systems

The preceding discussion implies that reliability evaluation techniques

have been developed and are being used in a wide range of engineering
disciplines; in fact the area of reliability evaluation is interdisciplinary,
and a particular method can be used in a number of applications, for
example, electrical, mechanical, chemical, civil. It should be noted,
however, that there is no such thing as a single reliability evaluation
technique that can be used for all problems. It would be convenient if this
were the case, and there is an attempt to standardise on a particular
technique in some industries. This is a serious mistake since the
technique should be the most suitable for a particular problem and set of
system operating functions and requirements. It is therefore worth briefly
outlining the types of systems that exist, since the available techniques
reflect these types.