About RS

IEEE Reliability Society - Reliability Engineering

The Reliability Society provides a professional home for Specialty Engineering communities or disciplines covering not only Reliability Engineering, but also Integrity, System Safety, Prognostics and Health Management (PHM) Testability, System Security, Human System Interface (HSI), Human Factors (HF), Maintainability, and Supportability Engineering disciplines, Software Engineering with a focus on trust, system security, privacy and cyber-security.

Reliability is a design engineering discipline which applies scientific knowledge to assure a product will perform its intended function for the required duration within a given environment. This includes designing in the ability to maintain, test, and support the product throughout its total life cycle. Reliability is best described as product performance over time. This is accomplished concurrently with other design disciplines by contributing to the selection of the system architecture, materials, processes, and components -- both software and hardware; followed by verifying the selections made by thorough analysis and test.

The skills and knowledge required to achieve reliable products are:

• statistical analysis,
• product reliability modeling for selection of redundancy Vs component reliability,
• trade study analysis,
• reliability predictions,
• worst case stress/tolerance/sigma design performance analysis,
• engineering based physics of failure,
• failure modes/effects/criticality analysis,
• reliability test planning and testing -- product stress screening/ accelerated life/demonstration,
• failure analysis,
• maintenance concept definition,
• maintainability analysis,
• maintainability test planning and demonstration,
• supportability analysis,
• derating analysis,
• human engineering analysis,
• product safety analysis,
• reliability/maintainability/system safety/ quality/logistics support/human factors/software performance monitoring, and
• product effectiveness.

Reliability is a product design attribute that cannot be ignored! Every design has reliability characteristics - It is a critical ingredient of all designs created within all industries. It is far better to explicitly consider reliability than to ignore it and hope for the best!