ABSTRACT
Billions of dollars are spent globally every year to construct/manufacture, operate, and maintain various types of equipment/systems for the oil and gas industry. Reliability of equipment used in the oil and gas industrial sector has become an important issue due to various types of equipment reliability-related problems over the years. For example, corrosion-related failures including maintenance, direct cost in the U.S. petroleum industry alone was $3.7 billion per year in 1996 [1,2].
