engineering uncertainty and risk analysis, sergio e. serrano, hydroscience inc., 2001, 456 pages

QUALITY AND RELIABILITY ENGINEERING INTERNATIONAL

Qual. Reliab. Engng. Int. 2003; 19:85–86

BOOK REVIEWS

Engineering Uncertainty and Risk Analysis, Sergio E.Serrano, Hydroscience Inc., 2001, 456 pages.

The author’s preface states that the book ‘attempts tooffer the engineering community an integrated, balanced,and clear presentation to probability, statistics, stochasticmodels, and stochastic differential equations’. Also, ‘theaim is to demonstrate to the reader that the fundamentalprinciples are inherently simple, and that (the methods)are practical and extremely useful in everyday engineeringanalysis or design’. The book succeeds admirably in theseaims.

Chapter 1 discusses uncertainty in engineering, con-trasting it with uncertainty as usually encountered inpure science. The essential differences are beautifullyexplained, providing a philosophical and practical basis forthe rest of the book. This essential introduction is lackingin most books on statistics applications in engineering.

The following chapters describe basic probability con-cepts and mathematics, distribution statistics, simulationmethods, estimation theory, regression analysis, statisticalexperiments, stochastic processes and stochastic differen-tial equations. There is also a chapter on reliability, butthis covers only the basic mathematical methods, and theonly reference given is to a 1975 book on reliability theory.The chapter on random variables includes an excellentdiscussion on the dangers of applying the normal (Gaus-sian) distribution to predict the behaviour of variables wellbeyond the limits of the actual data, into the tails of thedistribution—a mistake too often made in engineering riskand safety analysis and prediction.

All of the many examples presented are worked usingspreadsheets and the Maple mathematics software. Eachchapter provides a number of reader problems and answersare provided in an appendix.

Overall, the book presents clear and interesting des-criptions and explanations. The level of mathematics isappropriate to reasonably numerate engineers, and the useof spreadsheets and Maple enhance the practical valueto engineers. I strongly recommend this book to designand systems engineers, and to engineering course tutorslooking for a good introduction to this important topic.

This review was originally published in ‘Aerospace’.It is reproduced with permission from the RoyalAeronautical Society.

PATRICK O’CONNOR

(DOI: 10.1002/qre.486)

Reliability Modeling, Winfred G. Schneeweiss,LiLoLe-Verlag GmbH, Hagen, Germany, 2001.366 pages, €55. ISBN 3-934447-04-X

The term ‘dependability’ is now widely used to describethe study of what was previously termed ‘reliability’, sothat the subtitle ‘Modeling in the Fields of Dependability,Maintainability and Safety Engineering’ is apt. (Americanspelling is used throughout.) The book is divided into12 chapters (numbered 0 to 11) and seven appendices.Dependability modelling is described and analysed inChapters 0 to 9, Chapter 10 is devoted to closingremarks and Chapter 11 contains solutions to the exercises.The appendices contain some basic material, but they arenot organized in such a way as to sustain the author’sclaim that ‘this book can be used as the basic textof a course on reliability/dependability theory’. Somefundamental topics are ignored or only mentioned inpassing. For instance, although the importance of ‘burn-in’ is mentioned, the author assumes that the readerwill understand both the meaning and importance of thisprocess; neither does he explain the distinction between‘warm’ and ‘hot’ standby.

Chapters 1 to 4 deal successively with systems of one,two, three, four and five components (units); Chapters 6and 7 cover systems with many units. Although this is alogical arrangement it prevents the author from dealingwith fault tolerance in a systematic manner.

Chapter 1 starts with some basic results and continueswith analyses of a single unit with periodic preventiverenewals or checks. This is followed by the analyses of thesingle repairable unit. The chapter ends with a very usefulsection on special missions (e.g. sporadic demands of shortduration).

Chapter 2 contains useful analyses of some two-unitsystems, e.g. the Markov model of a standby system witha fallible switch.

Chapter 3 (Three-component systems) includes anal-yses of 1-out-of-3:Good and 2-out-of-3:Good systems.(There is a mistake in Equation 3.70 of this chapter.)

Chapter 4 contains useful suggestions for approximat-ing parameters (e.g. system mean failure frequency) insome of the more complex calculations involved in redun-dant four-unit systems.

In Chapter 5 (Selected systems with five or a fewmore components) the topics covered are: single-bridgesystems (there is a mistake in Figure 5.4(b)); double-bridgesystems; and small consecutive k-out-of-n:F systems.

Copyright c© 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.