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Reliability engineering and risk analysis: a practical guide: M. Modarres, M.

Kaminskiy and V. Kritsov, Marcel Dekker Inc., New York, 1999, 542 pages

Article  in  Reliability Engineering [?] System Safety · August 2002

DOI: 10.1016/S0951-8320(02)00008-X

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 Reliability Engineering and System Safety 77 (2002) 207±208
Book Review
Reliability engineering and risk analysis: a practical
guide
M. Modarres, M. Kaminskiy and V. Kritsov, Marcel Dekker
Inc., New York, 1999, 542 pages
This book deals with the techniques of reliability
analysis, adopting the perspective of their application to
problem solving. It is therefore specially suited for
practicing engineers, although it can also be used as a text-
book especially at undergraduate level. The book explains
the methods and techniques used in reliability analysis,
discussing their use and limitations but avoiding the more
theoretical aspects and the derivations of the results.
Chapter 1 de®nes reliability, availability and risk analysis
and Chapter 2 reviews the main aspects of probability and
statistics that are essential to the understanding of the book
and the application of the methods. It introduces the basic
aspects of probability and of Boolean algebra. It then
presents the main probability distributions, both discrete
(binomial, hypergeometric, Poisson and geometric) and
continuous (normal, lognormal, exponential, Weibull,
Gamma and beta). It also includes estimation and hypoth-
esis testing, tests of goodness-of-®t, regression analysis and
algebra of random variables.
Chapter 3, ªElements of Component Reliabilityº,
describes methods to quantify the reliability of replaceable
components, i.e. of non-repairable components. The
methods presented build in the material presented in
Chapter 2 as they are very much centred in statistical
methods to analyse ®eld data, yielding predictions of
component reliability. It studies various functions that
describe the reliability of a component, such as mean time
to failure, failure rate and reliability function and presents
the expressions for these functions for the various
probability density functions considered in the previous
chapter. It discusses how to estimate the parameters of
the distributions from the ®eld data dealing with graphical
procedures, with classical parametric estimation (with
censoring), with non-parametric estimation and with
Bayesian estimation.
Chapter 4, ªSystem Reliability Analysisº, deals with
methods of combining the information about each of the
components to produce estimates of reliability of the system
made of non-repairable components. It presents the methods
of reliability block diagram, of fault tree and success tree, of
event tree, of master logic diagram and FMEA/FMECA. In
general the basic idea of each method is introduced and
exempli®ed with simple cases, with the reader being
0951-8320/02/$ - see front matter
PII: S 0951-832 0(02)00008-X
www.elsevier.com/locate/ress
referred to commercial computer programs to be able to
solve more realistic problems.
Chapter 5 deals with systems that are made of repairable
components. In this case it is no longer the reliability of
the system that is the important descriptive parameter but
its availability, which is the main topic of this chapter. It
starts to introduce probabilistic models and statistical
methods that are used to determine the failure character-
istics of repairable components. The homogeneous and
non-homogeneous Poisson processes are introduced and
methods to determine the rate of occurrence of failures
(ROCOF) are discussed. A very brief introduction is also
included about the use of Markovian methods to determine
system availability.
Chapters 6 and 7 discuss several topics that are of interest
to reliability engineering, although neither in any speci®c
sequence nor with one objective speci®cally stated except
providing a set of useful additional information. The various
selected topics that are included after this chapter include a
very brief and unsatisfactory discussion of stress±strength
analysis, and references to software reliability analysis,
human reliability, reliability centred maintenance and
reliability growth. Importance measures are also discussed
in a section, which although not being very extensive, is a
good overview. The other chapter of selected topics is
focused on data analysis and discusses accelerated life
testing, analysis of dependent failures, uncertainty analysis,
expert opinion and probabilistic failure analysis.
Chapter 8 deals with Risk Analysis and this can be
considered the weakest part of the book. If the book was
only addressing Reliability Engineering the chapter on risk
analysis could be considered an adequate coverage of a special
topic in the same spirit as the other topics included in
Chapters 6 and 7. However, having Risk Analysis in the
title of the book, the reader is certainly disappointed by
the limited coverage of the topic, which occupies no more
than about 40 pages from the 540 pages of the book.
The appendices include some statistical tables and some
generic failure data. They also list some of the available
commercial software that may be considered to analyse
complex systems and provide a user manual for simple
software that is supplied with the book to perform some
elementary calculations.
Overall the book can be considered to achieve its objec-
tives and to be an excellent book to introduce the methods of
reliability engineering to practitioners and to students deal-
ing with this subject for the ®rst time. The essential methods
are explained, examples help to show how to apply the
208 Book Review / Reliability Engineering and System Safety 77 (2002) 207±208

methods and exercises can be used to con®rm that the For the readers that are interested in reliability engineer-
material has been absorbed. The presentation is, in general, ing, especially in analysing cases and solving problems this
clear and to the point, not being unnecessarily complicated book is recommended as a very good one.
with theoretical aspects or mathematical derivations of
different expressions. Carlos Guedes Soares*
The selected topics are generally interesting introductions Technical University of Lisbon,
to some related subjects that may raise the curiosity of the Instituto Superior TeÂcnico,
reader to further reading. Risk analysis is only covered Av. Rovisco Pais, 1049-001
brie¯y and more justice would be made if it were not part Lisboa, Portugal
of the title and simply one more selected topic of which a E-mail address: guedess@alfa.ist.utl.pt
brief introduction was given.

* Tel.: 1351-21-841-7607; fax: 1351-21-847-4015.

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