What is Reliability?

Many life-critical systems are required to operate without a system failure for a given period of time. Examples are nuclear, aeorspace, spacecraft and other such systems. Redundancy is often used to achieve high reliability. Such systems are fault tolerant since they can continue to function even when one or more of its components have failed.

In these pages, we provide basic definitions a brief descriptions of various modeling methods, statistical aspect of reliability and several applications. We will also provide references to our books and papers. Connectivity links are provided to availability, performability, software reliability and software rejuvenation web pages. We also provide a link to various software packages for reliability modeling.