Reliability Engineering - Social Application

The term engineering is the application of the concepts of science to solve problems. Reliability engineering is applying the concepts and methods of reliability to continously improve a system's reliability throughout its life-cycle.

A practical example:
Let's consider a worshipper, who recognizes that he committed a sin. His conscience tells him he needs to improve his worshipping commitment, one way of performing so is by applying ways to improve his reliability (i.e. reduce the number of times he sins per unit time, lets say a month). He decides to reduce the amount of time he spends chatting with others so that the probability that he talks about someone from behind their back is reduced and hence, his reliability as a worshipper improves.

What the worshipper did above was change a process he is involved with, the process of chatting.

Similiarly in engineering systems, reliability engineering is an integral part of the system's design process, some of the methods of improving reliability are,

A. During the Design Phase

1. Design changes
2. Level of authority and constraints on the design discipline
3. Design reviews carried out by designers, reliability engineers, quality engineers, production engineers, customers, marketing department, test teams
4. Redesign
5. Protype testing under enough amount of time
6. Perform reliability estimation, prediction and growth plans
7. Document reliability specifications for system components
8. Document causes of reliability degradation

B. During the Production Phase
1. Reliability and quality production testing
2. Verification and Validation
3. Perform statistical analysis of test data
4. Provide assistance to production, quality assurance and purchasing

C. During the Support Phase
1. Field failure report systems

MIL-STD-785 provides a description of a reliability program