What is reliability? Reliability refers to the ability of a system, product, or service to perform its intended function, under specified conditions, for a given period of time.  For example, if a watch works precisely for 10 years, it can be considered as reliable. Reliability plays an important role in ensuring the field performance of a product. Poor reliability leads to malfunction, task delay, unexpected maintenance and cost, even disasters that cause the loss of human lives or assets.

So, it is important to strengthen the reliability throughout product life cycle. This includes various reliability activities to be taken, such as reliability modeling, analysis, design, testing, evaluation, and management. This course, Principles of System Reliability, is designed to introduce all these reliability activities systematically. After learning the course, you will master the principles of reliability, and the knowledge and skills to analyze and solve engineering cases in the perspective of reliability.

Welcome to this course, Principles of System Reliability! I am Dr. Ping Jiang, from National University of Defense Technology.

This course is proposed to students subjected in Industrial Engineering.

After learning thecourse, you will master:

1. The definitions of reliability and some related terms, such as availability, maintainability, safety, etc. Reliability indices and lifetime distributions;

2. The most widely used reliability models;

3. Reliability analysis methods: Failure Mode Effects Analysis (FMEA) and Fault Tree Analysis (FTA);

4. Design for Reliability: Reliability Allocation, Reliability Prediction and DFR methods;

5. Reliability testing methods, such as Environment Stress Screening (ESS), Reliability Growth Testing (RGT), Reliability Qualification Testing (RQT), etc;

6. Reliability evaluation methods, in cases of large sample size and small sample size.

In a word, you can master the knowledge and skills to analyze and solve reliability problems in engineering.

Ping Jiang, Yunyan Xing, Bo Guo, Wenke Cheng. An Introduction to Reliability Engineering[M]. Beijing：National Defense Industry Press，2015.10.