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Development of engineering reliability analysis started with the desire for prod­uct quality control in manufacturing engineering three-quarters of a century ago (Shewart, 1931). World War II considerably accelerated its advancement. During the war, over 60 percent of airborne equipment shipped to the Far East arrived damaged. About half the spares and equipment in storage became […]

The performance of a hydrosystem engineering infrastructure, function of an engineering project, or completion of an operation all involve a number of con­tributing components, and most of them, if not all, are subject to various types of uncertainty (Fig. 1.1). Detailed elaboration of uncertainties in hydrosystem engineering and their analysis are given in Tung and […]

1.1 Reliability Engineering Occasionally, failures of engineering systems catch public attention and raise concern over the safety and performance of the systems. The cause of the mal­function and failure could be natural phenomena, human error, or deficiency in design and manufacture. Reliability engineering is a field developed in recent decades to deal with such safety […]

Through my academic career, I have spent most of research efforts on problems relating to probabilistic hydrosystem engineering. I am truly thankful to my advisor, Larry W. Mays, who first introduced me to this fascinating area when I was a Ph. D. student. Over the years, both Larry and the late Ben C. Yen have […]

Failures of major engineering systems always raise public concern on the safety and reliability of engineering infrastructure. Decades ago quantitative evalua­tions of the reliability of complex infrastructure systems were not practical, if not impossible. Engineers had to resort to the use of a safety factor mainly de­termined through experience and judgment. The contribution of human […]