Need for Reliability Assurance in System Design and Operation

In order to minimize the overall costs and assure operational readiness and safety of a system, a high reliability is essential. For systems where operational readiness and safety are not of great concern, the cost benefit obtained from a reliability study should be weighed against the life cycle cost of the system. For costly and/or complex systems the reliability analysis may not only greatly improve the operational features of a system, but substantially reduce the operational costs for only modest increases in design costs. The concepts of basic reliability, including various specific areas of reliability essential to engineers and other personnel closely related to systems design, are presented.