Book reviews-
Reliability and Optimal Maintenance
Detailed review of:
Reliability and Optimal Maintenance
Publishers
: Springer Verlag
Editor
: Hongzhou Wang and Hoang Pham
Title
: Reliability and Optimal Maintenance
Year of Publication
: 2006
Pages
: 345
ISBN
: 1846283248
Reviewer
: Krishna B. Misra
Status
: Review published in IJPE, Vol. 4, No. 3, July 2008, p. 254.
The book consists of 12 chapters as follows:
Chapter 1:
Introduction
12 Pages
Chapter 2:
Imperfect Maintenance and Dependence
18 Pages
Chapter 3:
Maintenance Policies
20 Pages
Chapter 4:
A Quasi-renewal Process and Its Applications
40 Pages
Chapter 5:
Reliability and Optimal Maintenance of Series Systems with Imperfect Repair and Dependence
20 Pages
Chapter 6:
Opportunistic Maintenance of Multi-unit Systems
24 Pages
Chapter 7:
Optimal Preparedness Maintenance of Multi-unit Systems with Imperfect Maintenance and Economic Dependence
16 Pages
Chapter 8:
Optimal Opportunistic Maintenance Policies of k-out-of-n Systems
20 Pages
Chapter 9:
Reliability and Optimal Inspection-maintenance Models
32 Pages
Chapter 10:
Warranty Cost Models with Dependence and Imperfect Repair
56 Pages
Chapter 11:
Software Reliability, Cost and Optimization Models
16 Pages
Chapter 12:
Monte Carlo Reliability Simulation of Complex Systems
20 Pages
Appendix: A1 – A3
14 Pages
References
32 Pages
Index
5 Pages
Recently, some very good books on the subject of optimal maintenance policies and models have been available in the literature. This is one of them. The book provides detailed coverage of several models available in the area of imperfect maintenance, dependence,
opportunistic maintenance, and presents optimal maintenance policies for various systems. Extensive literature survey in each chapter forms a useful compendium to chapters. As can be noticed from the table of contents that the chapter on Warrantee models occupies a major part of the book and rightly so since the warrantee costs constitutes a significant part of the product overall cost. Both consumers and manufactures stand to gain from maintenance during warrantee. Economic dependence, particularly in multi-component system, may exist along with imperfect maintenance. Software failures in modern system constitute a significant impact on the overall system reliability; the authors have covered some of the important aspects of this problem. Since the most practical method of system reliability or availability assessment is Monte Carlo simulation when other analytical methods become unwieldy or cumbersome to use, the authors have devoted some 20 pages to cover this aspect along with variance reduction techniques, which are inevitable in any simulation approach. There are very few books on reliability that attempt to discuss this in sufficient detail. Also perhaps that is why the authors have chosen the title of the book as Reliability and Optimal maintenance. Another indispensable part of this book is 32 pages list of references included by the authors which provides a reader an indication of how several new developments have taken place in this area over a period of about four decades.
The reviewer feels, this book will prove to be a good help to a graduate student or a researcher who intends to know the state-of-the-art in the area of optimal maintenance models and policies.
Krishna B. Misra
Review published in the International Journal of Performability Engineering, Vol. 4, No. 3, July 2008, p. 254.