ABSTRACT
Most of the reliability methods are associated with components of a system; that is, the methods deal with failures of the basic elements of a system. This chapter provides historical insight into the development of reliability engineering, describes the relationship of component reliability methods to system reliability engineering, and provides brief descriptions of some of the more important system reliability methods. Probabilistic methods dominated early reliability work because the available tools would support no other approach. The development of the reliability prediction process illustrates the trend from probabilistic to deterministic reliability. Reliability block diagrams represent a system's reliability, and facilitate system reliability calculations, in much the same way that an electronic circuit is represented schematically to calculate its outputs. Reliability growth methods allow a manufacturer to begin introducing a product to service before its ultimate reliability is reached.
