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Reliability engineering
Rao S., Prentice Hall Press, Upper Saddle River, NJ, 2014. 832 pp. Type: Book (978-0-136015-72-7)
Date Reviewed: Aug 24 2015

This is a perfect book supporting a course on reliability modeling. It presents a broad range of material, starting from the fundamentals and going into moderately advanced problems. Because resilience to failures is one of the most important nonfunctional features of any system (maybe just next to security), this topic is covered in any engineering curricula. Therefore, Rao’s book can be recommended as a textbook fit for teaching and learning. Many parts related to universal reliability problems will also be useful for computer and network specialists.

Chapter 1 provides an introduction to reliability issues. Next, Rao introduces the basics of probability theory, random processes, and random variables (chapters 1 to 3 and chapter 5) as the base for further parts of the book. The author starts to directly consider reliability issues in chapter 4, where he deals with extreme distributions useful in elaborating on strength issues. This kind of distribution can be also interesting in computer science, when, for instance, risk problems are covered. Then, basic notions related to reliability theory are presented in chapter 6.

The next three chapters present reliability problems characteristic of mechanical engineering, that is, modeling of material strengths and loads. Afterwards, Rao comes back to universal issues by elaborating on reliability simulations (chapter 10), reliability optimization (chapter 11), modeling of structural reliability (chapter 12), reliability testing (chapter 13), quality control (chapter 14), maintainability modeling (chapter 15), and warranty modeling (chapter 16). At the end of the book, tables with data related to normal, t-distribution, and chi square distributions are given. I do not believe we still need such tables given the Internet, but obviously it does not decrease the value of this book. The last appendix is a short review on product liability problems.

Nowadays, it is not easy to prepare a basic book on reliability theory that is perceived as novel. There are many books on this topic on my shelf. One option is to deal with reliability in applications related to a specific engineering field. Here, Trivedi’s classic work [1] can be mentioned, or [2,3,4] to name a few more recent works. If one is looking for such a book, the one by Rao is not a suitable position, unless the reader is interested in mechanical engineering, the main field of the author’s scientific contribution. On the other hand, the book rather resembles [4] or [5], yet it is successful in being distinctive. First, Rao presents reliability theory with the broad background of applied mathematics (especially statistics), a fact nicely emphasized by the biographies of famous mathematicians given instead of quotations at the beginning of chapters. Next, the author describes MATLAB procedures containing algorithms elaborated in various parts of the book (examples in Excel are also given). They can be helpful with organizing laboratory classes. Last but not least, each chapter ends with sections containing questions and revision material, and these sections are really well thought through. Lecturers will appreciate them, since many questions can be directly used in tests or exams on general reliability theory. Rao gives not only open questions or calculation exercises (some of them with answers), but also adds single-choice or fill-in-the-blank questions. As such, this book can also be recommended for effective self-learning.

Reviewer:  Piotr Cholda Review #: CR143717 (1511-0924)
1) Trivedi, K. S. Probability and statistics with reliability, queuing, and computer science applications (2nd ed.). John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York, NY, 2002.
2) Xie, M.; Dai, Y.-S.; Poh, K.-L. Computing systems reliability: models and analysis. Kluwer, New York, NY, 2004.
3) Ayers, M. L. Telecommunications system reliability engineering, theory, and practice. Wiley-IEEE Press, Hoboken, NJ, 2012.
4) Pham, H. System software reliability. Springer-Verlag, London, UK, 2006.
5) O’Connor, P.; Kleyner, A. Practical reliability engineering (5th ed.). John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., Chichester, UK, 2012.
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