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SYSTEMS RELIABILITY AND FAILURE PREVENTION
by Herbert Hecht

“This timely resource offers you a comprehensive, unified treatment of the techniques and
practice of systems reliability and failure prevention, without the use of advanced
mathematics. Featuring numerous, in-depth real-world examples, the book distills the
author’s many years of practical experience in designing and testing critical systems. The
book helps you set reliability requirements for a new product, monitor compliance with these
requirements during development and later life cycle phases, account for software failures in
an integrated reliability assessment, and allocate a fixed reliability improvement budget to
guide decisions by cost considerations and trade-offs.

“The book opens with a review of the essentials of reliability engineering and then focuses on
the organizational causes of failure, a critical topic that rarely receives attention. It thoroughly
examines the techniques for reducing and preventing failures that affect system reliability -
conservative design, the use of analytical tools and procedures, extensive testing and
redundancy - and discusses their capabilities and limitations. Moreover, this comprehensive
reference covers the formulation of functional and reliability requirements for critical systems,
and concludes with examples from communication networks, aircraft and missile systems,
the process industry and satellite missions.”

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CONTENTS

Introduction.

Essentials of Reliability Engineering - The Exponential Distribution. Parameter Estimation.
Reliability Block Diagrams. State Transition Methods. The Devil is in the Details. Summary.

Organizational Cause of Failures - Failures are not Inevitable. Thoroughly Documented
Failures. Summary.

Analytical Approaches to Failure Prevention - Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA).
Sneak Circuit Analysis (SCA). Fault Tree Analysis (FTA). Summary.

Testing to Prevent Failures - Reliability Demonstration. Design Margins. Reliability
Relevance of Tests during Development. Reliability Relevance of Post-Development Tests.
In-Service Testing. Summary.

Redundancy Techniques - Introduction to Redundancy at the Component Level. Dual
Redundancy. Triple Redundancy. Higher Order Redundant Configurations. Other Forms of
Redundancy. Summary.

Software Reliability - The Nature and Statistical Measures of Software Failures. Failure
Prevention Practices. Software Fault Tolerance. Software Reliability Models. Summary.

Failure Prevention in the Life Cycle - Life Cycle Format and Terminology. Reliability Issues in
Life Cycle Phases. The Reliability Program Plan. Reviews and Audits. Summary.

Cost of Failure and Failure Prevention - Optimum Reliability. Time Considerations of
Expenditures. Estimation of Cost Elements. A Generic Cost of Reliability Model. Summary.

Cost Trade-Offs - Reliability Improvement to Meet Quality of Service Requirements.
Increasing Maintenance Effectiveness. Replacement of Communication Satellites. Summary.

Applications - Power Supply for Ground Communications. Reliability of Aircraft Electronics
Bay. Spacecraft Attitude Determination. Summary.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

“HERBERT HECHT is vice chairman of the board of SoHaR Incorporated, an R&D and
consulting company for high dependability systems. He holds a Ph.D. in engineering from the
University of California at Los Angeles and an M.S. in electrical engineering from Polytechnic
University of New York.”

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2003, 244 pages. Order #DR724.

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