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Detailed review of: 

Life Cycle Reliability Engineering

The book consists of 11 chapters as follows:

This book is quite different from traditional books written on reliability engineering so far and is authored by a person who has a rich industrial experience of working with Ford Motor Company. With advent of globalization, international free trade and flow of capital across nations, and

consumer becoming ever-increasing knowledgeable and choosy, the competition between product manufactures has become intense. They now need to deliver products with improved reliability, reduced production and warrantee costs and increased customer satisfaction. This book treats reliability as a necessary characteristic of product at each stage of product life cycle such as product conceptualization and planning, design and development, design verification and process validation, production, field use, and disposal. The chapters also have been arranged in the same order of life cycle activities. The reviewer however didn't find any chapter on product disposal which is becoming very important these days due to requirement of recycle, reuse and remanufacturing for developing sustainable products. Perhaps in stead of reliability, one would need to extend the definition of reliability to a higher level of concept like performability, as has been suggested by the reviewer (and has also edited a Handbook of Performability Engineering, recently), which will allow us to integrate product life cycles with environmental impacts life cycles of a product in order to develop sustainable products of 21st Century with minimum material, energy, and wastes and create minimum adverse environmental impacts by the processes and use at all stages of product life cycle.  Coming back to the book in question, the author needs to be complimented for this exposition of reliability in such a context which otherwise has been traditionally treated as a mathematical and analytical sense by several previous authors. The reviewer would like to recommend all students and practitioners of reliability to give book a serious look and study. The book is quite informative and provides a good insight of methodologies and techniques used in reliability engineering. This will go a long way in creating competitive products that perform well in the market and also provide customer satisfaction.

K. B. Misra

This review has been published in the International Journal of Performability Engineering, Vol. 5, No. 2, January 2009 issue on page 176.