ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the basic elements of component reliability evaluation. The discussion centers primaxily around the classical frequency approach to component reliability. The chapter presents the fundamental aspects of component reliability analysis from the Bayesian point of view. It begins with a formal definition of reliability and defines commonly used terms and metrics. The chapter focuses on important aspects of component reliability analysis. It tabulates reliability characteristics of components whose times to failure are exponential, normal, lognormal, Weibull, or gamma. The chapter also discusses some of the more subtle characteristics of each of these distributions. It also presents several useful probability density function (pdf) models for reliability analysis of components, and elaborates several methods for selecting and evaluating the models using observed failure data. These methods can be divided into four groups: nonparametric methods, parametric methods, total-time-on-test plots, and goodness-of-fit tests, and the chapter discusses each of these methods in detail.
