operate/function satisfactorily at the intended point of time. Most products/devices are meant for intermittent or continuous duty. Many of these items are repairable. Once such a product fails, a diagnosis of failure followed by a corrective action can put the product to its initial or pre-failure state and the product becomes available for use (intended function). Thus , the repair function comes in. Efforts to enhance availability of a product at all times during its useful life go much beyond repair. In fact, we focus on 1. Monitoring /inspection at appropriate times and opening the product up 2. Repairing the components that are going to fail, by replenishing the required properties and 3. Replacing the components that have already failed. These three activities constitute the core of maintenance. Like any other activity, maintenance as a broad activity as also each of its component activities has to be 1. Planned 2. Monitored and 3. Evaluated. Continued availability through necessary maintenance corresponds to maintainability. However, maintainability to ensure both point-wise and interval availability is primarily determined by design features that take due care of ease and effectiveness of inspection and repair/replacement. Usual availability analysis assumes only two states viz. functional or up and failed or down for any component or system at any point or during any period of time. Point-wise availability or operational readiness requires that the product is in the up-state at the intended point of time. Availability will be quantified as a probability that the product is in the up- state when required. Point-wise availability of a non-repairable item which is required to be up at many different points of time can be estimated as the proportion of times the item was really in the up-state. Proceeding analytically, we can take availability as a function A (t) =1 if the item is up and =0 if the item is down , at time t. The availability over a period (0,T) is the integral of A (t) over (0,T). The limit of this as T goes to infinity is called limiting availability. Period availability can be interpreted as the proportion of time the item remains up or operational during a given period of time. The item could be down ,waiting for or undergoing repair, during the remaining portion of the given period. When we consider an item that starts in the up-state, remains there for a random duration and fails, waits and then goes for repair for random times, and then comes back to the up state, we define availability as under Availability= MTTF/ (MTTR+MTTF) where MTTF=mean time to failure and MTTR=mean time to repair. To increase availability, therefore, we need to Increase MTTF (mean length of stay in the up-state) Decrease MTTR (including mean time waiting for repair) Or do both. We proceed further by noting that most items in use are multi-component systems with certain configurations. To enhance MTTF, we can introduce cold or warm redundancy use devices /systems under less than rated capacity increase component reliabilities. An important and sometimes challenging task is to optimize redundancy to achieve the highest reliability subject to cost or weight or volume constraints. Reduction in MTTR would obviously imply Avoiding delays in taking up repair/replacement processes and making them effective. Also inspection of system state should be simple and quick. Maintainability is a consequence of two functions viz. (1) system design and (2) maintenance. The second relates to maintenance on failure/ break-down. Planned maintenance leads to enhanced availability. To reduce maintenance delays and enhance maintenance effectiveness, planning of maintenance manpower and maintenance facilities as also of spare parts plays an important role. Spares planning must take into account failure rates of different parts as also their costs, besides considerations of holding inventories with associated costs. Calculation of availability requires calculation of MTTF as the inverse of system failure rate. The latter is obtained from system configuration and component reliabilities. For simple systems like series or parallel or k-out of-n, this is relatively simple. Even for complicated systems, system failure rate can be worked out by the min-max theorem. System mean time-to-failure can be also derived from the probability distribution of system failure time, starting with corresponding distributions for components. Expressions are simpler if components function independently with the system and there is no mechanical sticking. This again is a consequence of system design. Redundancy optimization attempts started with Ketteles algorithm and has since proceeded through many search algorithms genetic algorithm. A lot of recent work on this topic corresponds to soft computing, especially those which use fuzzy component reliabilities or fuzzy system configurations. In the final analysis, availability is the composite of reliability and maintainability. In many cases, availability and reliability are synonymous. Availability is ensured through proper design, careful use and effective maintenance. All these three are covered in Concurrent Engineering.