This book promotes and describes the application of objective and effective decision making in asset management based on mathematical models and practical techniques that can be easily implemented in organizations. This comprehensive and timely publication will be an essential reference source, building on available literature in the field of asset management while laying the groundwork for further research breakthroughs in this field. The text provides the resources necessary for managers, technology developers, scientists and engineers to adopt and implement better decision making based on models and techniques that contribute to recognizing risks and uncertainties and, in general terms, to the important role of asset management to increase competitiveness in organizations.

This book details how safety (i.e. the absence of unacceptable risks) is ensured in areas where potentially explosive atmospheres (ATEX) can arise. The book also offers readers essential information on how to comply with the newest (April 2016) EU legislation when the presence of ATEX cannot be avoided. By presenting general guidance on issues arising out of the EU ATEX legislation - especially on zone classification, explosion risk assessment, equipment categorization, Ex-marking and related technical/chemical aspects - the book provides equipment manufacturers, responsible employers, and others with the essential knowledge they need to be able to understand the different - and often complicated - aspects of ATEX and to implement the necessary safety precautions. As such, it represents a valuable resource for all those concerned with maintaining high levels of safety in ATEX environments.

The book introduces basic risk concepts and then goes on to discuss risk management and analysis processes and steps. The main emphasis is on methods that fulfill the requirements of one or several risk management steps. The focus is on risk analysis methods including statistical-empirical analyses, probabilistic and parametrized models, engineering approaches and simulative methods, e.g. for fragment and blast propagation or hazard density computation. Risk management is essential for improving all resilience management steps: preparation, prevention, protection, response and recovery. The methods investigate types of event and scenario, as well as frequency, exposure, avoidance, hazard propagation, damage and risks of events. Further methods are presented for context assessment, risk visualization, communication, comparison and assessment as well as selecting mitigation measures. The processes and methods are demonstrated using detailed results and overviews of security research projects, in particular in the applications domains transport, aviation, airport security, explosive threats and urban security and safety. Topics include: sufficient control of emerging and novel hazards and risks, occupational safety, identification of minimum (functional) safety requirements, engineering methods for countering malevolent or terrorist events, security research challenges, interdisciplinary approaches to risk control and management, risk-based change and improvement management, and support of rational decision-making. The book addresses advanced bachelor students, master and doctoral students as well as scientists, researchers and developers in academia, industry, small and medium enterprises working in the emerging field of security and safety engineering.

This book is devoted to the analysis of causal inference which is one of the most difficult tasks in data analysis: when two phenomena are observed to be related, it is often difficult to decide whether one of them causally influences the other one, or whether these two phenomena have a common cause. This analysis is the main focus of this volume. To get a good understanding of the causal inference, it is important to have models of economic phenomena which are as accurate as possible. Because of this need, this volume also contains papers that use non-traditional economic models, such as fuzzy models and models obtained by using neural networks and data mining techniques. It also contains papers that apply different econometric models to analyze real-life economic dependencies.

This book introduces an approach to active system control design and development to improve the properties of our technological systems. It extends concepts of control and data accumulation by explaining how the system model should be organized to improve the properties of the system under consideration. The authors define these properties as reliability, performance and energy-efficiency, and self-adaption. They describe how they bridge the gap between data accumulation and analysis in terms of interpolation with the real physical models when data used for interpretation of the system conditions. The authors introduce a principle of active system control and safety - an approach that explains what a model of a system should have, making computer systems more efficient, a crucial new concern in application domains such as safety critical, embedded and low-power autonomous systems like transport, healthcare, and other dynamic systems with moving substances and elements. On a theoretical level, this book further extends the concept of fault tolerance, introducing a system level of design for improving overall efficiency. On a practical level it illustrates how active system approach might help our systems be self-evolving.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the Third Asia Pacific Requirements Engineering Symposium, APRES 2016, held in Nagoya, Japan, in November 2016. The 7 full papers presented together with three short papers, were carefully reviewed and selected from 14 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on requirements traceability and prioritization; requirements modeling and process for quality; requirements validation; requirements analysis.

Demonstrates How To Perform FMEAs Step-by-Step Originally designed to address safety concerns, Failure Mode and Effect Analysis (FMEA) is now used throughout the industry to prevent a wide range of process and product problems. Useful in both product design and manufacturing, FMEA can identify improvements early when product and process changes are relatively easy and inexpensive to make. Updated to include changes reflected in ISO/TX-16949:2002 standards and 2008 AIAG guidelines, The Basics of FMEA, Second Edition continues to provide the expert advice needed to help shorten the learning curve for FMEA teams to conduct effective and efficient FMEAs, even if it is their very first one. Includes Ready-to-Use Worksheet Templates Using a manufacturing case study, readers learn step-by-step how to use FMEAs to assess, evaluate, and prioritize areas of risk, and then to implement the actions needed to reduce risks to an acceptable level. It shows the steps needed to ferret out potential problems and prevent making inferior products that could endanger public and worker safety and compromise profits as well as the future of all stakeholders. Although engineers have typically analyzed processes and products for potential failures, the FMEA process standardizes the approach and establishes a common language that nontechnical as well as technical employees can use at all levels. Unlike other improvement tools, FMEA does not require complicated statistics. However, they require a full commitment to quality and a willingness to take a team approach that involves all stakeholders.

The key to the successful development of distributed measurement and control systems is the communications link. Emphasising the importance of communications standards, this topical text describes and discusses serial data highways developed for measurement and control applications. Such standards demand conformity to a protocol which ensures reliable transmissions between digital field devices, using a common communications interface. This comprehensive overview of the large family of data highways currently in use addresses all aspects of the practical implementation of industrial control systems. Features include:

• Up-to-date overview of serial networking technology for measurement and control applications.
• Review of the fundamental concepts and relative merits of twelve serial network communication standards.
• A valuable insight into a wide range of market sectors where proprietary, national and international standards now apply.
• Discussion of each established or evolving serial data highway in the context of its application.

This text is an invaluable reference source for engineers and product designers in measurement and control seeking to increase their awareness of developments in the complete range of market sectors. For anyone contemplating the development of a communications standard, this will prove an indispensable frame of reference. In addition to providing detailed information about the serial bus, this unique book will furnish advanced students of electronic and electrical engineering with a broader view of their subject and encourage a more product-oriented approach. Serial Networked Field Instrumentation forms part of the Wiley Series in MeasurementScience and Technology. Chief Editor: Peter Sydenham Australian Centre for Test and Evaluation, University of South Australia. This series was founded to coincide with the recognition of measurement science and instrument technology as fields with their own scholarship and techniques.

Covers basic principles and proactive and pragmatic quality function deployment (QFD) methods. Explains how to arrange groups in an industrial organization into design and development teams. Describes how to implement QFD to effectively produce quality products in a fashion that meets customers' needs. This book includes aspects of modern planning techniques, technological forecasting methods and value engineering.

working mechanisms and to develop the overall governance framework in which we operate. Catherine Geslain-Laneelle Executive Director European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) Parma, March 2008 Acknowledgements This book and the General Framework for the Precautionary and Inclusive Governance of Food Safety that it presents and critically discusses have grown out of research undertaken within one of the subprojects (work package 5) of the research project SAFE FOODS, 'Promoting Food Safety through a New Integrated Risk Analysis Approach for Foods'. The Integrated Project SAFE FOODS has been funded by the European Commission under the 6th Framework Programme (April 2004 to June 2008) and coordinated by Dr H.A. Kuiper and Dr H.J.P. Marvin of RIKILT-Institute of Food Safety at the University of Wageningen in the Netherlands. Subproject 5 of SAFE FOODS has dealt with institutional aspects of food safety governance with a focus on ways (procedural and structural mec- nisms) to improve the implementation of precaution, participation and a politi- science interface, and has been coordinated by the editors of this book. The General Framework and this book have been a collaborative effort of subproject 5 in which all contributors to the first part of this book were involved. We have very much appreciated this exceptionally fruitful cooperation. It has always been both greatly intellectually inspiring (with many intensive, focused discussions) and very pleasant (highly cooperative and reliable)."

This book provides a comprehensive up-to-date presentation of some of the classical areas of reliability, based on a more advanced probabilistic framework using the modern theory of stochastic processes. This framework allows analysts to formulate general failure models, establish formulae for computing various performance measures, as well as determine how to identify optimal replacement policies in complex situations. In this second edition of the book, two major topics have been added to the original version: copula models which are used to study the effect of structural dependencies on the system reliability; and maintenance optimization which highlights delay time models under safety constraints. Terje Aven is Professor of Reliability and Risk Analysis at University of Stavanger, Norway. Uwe Jensen is working as a Professor at the Institute of Applied Mathematics and Statistics of the University of Hohenheim in Stuttgart, Germany. Review of first edition: "This is an excellent book on mathematical, statistical and stochastic models in reliability. The authors have done an excellent job of unifying some of the stochastic models in reliability. The book is a good reference book but may not be suitable as a textbook for students in professional fields such as engineering. This book may be used for graduate level seminar courses for students who have had at least the first course in stochastic processes and some knowledge of reliability mathematics. It should be a good reference book for researchers in reliability mathematics." --Mathematical Reviews (2000)

This manual discusses how the Total Quality Management (TQM) of the production and manufacturing environment can be modified, implemented, and measured within the engineering project environment. It aims to integrate predominant quality philosophy with organization research.

Das Ingenieurwissen jetzt auch in Einzelbänden verfügbar. Messtechnik enthält die für Ingenieure und Naturwissenschaftler wesentlichen Grundlagen in kompakter Form zum Nachschlagen bereit.

Discrete Event Systems: Diagnosis and Diagnosability addresses the problem of fault diagnosis of Discrete Event Systems (DESs). This book provides the basic techniques and approaches necessary for the design of an efficient fault diagnosis system for a wide range of modern engineering applications. This book classifies the different techniques and approaches according to several criteria such as: modeling tools (Automata, Petri nets, Templates) that is used to construct the model; the information (qualitative based on events occurrences and/or states outputs, quantitative based on signal processing, data analysis) that is needed to analyze and achieve the diagnosis; the decision structure (centralized, decentralized) that is required to achieve the diagnosis; as well as the complexity (polynomial, exponential) of the algorithm that is used to determine the set of faults that the proposed approach is able to diagnose as well as the delay time required for this diagnosis. The goal of this classification is to select the efficient method to achieve the fault diagnosis according to the application constraints. This book will include illustrated examples of the presented methods and techniques as well as a discussion on the application of these methods on several real-world problems.

The global crisis the automotive industry has slipped into over the second half of 2008 has set a fierce spotlight not only on which cars are the right ones to bring to the market but also on how these cars are developed. Be it OEMs developing new models, suppliers integerating themselves deeper into the development processes of different OEMs, analysts estimating economical risks and opportunities of automotive investments, or even governments creating and evaluating scenarios for financial aid for suffering automotive companies: At the end of the day, it is absolutely indispensable to comprehensively understand the processes of auto- tive development - the core subject of this book. Let's face it: More than a century after Carl Benz, Wilhelm Maybach and Gottlieb Daimler developed and produced their first motor vehicles, the overall concept of passenger cars has not changed much. Even though components have been considerably optimized since then, motor cars in the 21st century are still driven by combustion engines that transmit their propulsive power to the road s- face via gearboxes, transmission shafts and wheels, which together with spri- damper units allow driving stability and ride comfort. Vehicles are still navigated by means of a steering wheel that turns the front wheels, and the required control elements are still located on a dashboard in front of the driver who operates the car sitting in a seat.

Wavelets: Theory and Applications for Manufacturing presents a systematic description of the fundamentals of wavelet transform and its applications. Given the widespread utilization of rotating machines in modern manufacturing and the increasing need for condition-based, as opposed to fix-interval, intelligent maintenance to minimize machine down time and ensure reliable production, it is of critical importance to advance the science base of signal processing in manufacturing. This volume also deals with condition monitoring and health diagnosis of rotating machine components and systems, such as bearings, spindles, and gearboxes, while also: -Providing a comprehensive survey on wavelets specifically related to problems encountered in manufacturing -Discussing the integration of wavelet transforms with other soft computing techniques such as fuzzy logic, for machine defect and severity classification -Showing how to custom design wavelets for improved performance in signal analysis Focusing on wavelet transform as a tool specifically applied and designed for applications in manufacturing, Wavelets: Theory and Applications for Manufacturing presents material appropriate for both academic researchers and practicing engineers working in the field of manufacturing.

Replacement Models with Minimal Repair is a collection of works by several well-known specialists on the subject of minimal repair in replacement policies. It gives an exhaustive list of minimal repair models for the effective planning of minimal repair and maintenance actions. Written in an engaging style, Replacement Models with Minimal Repair balances complex mathematical models with practical applications. It is divided into six parts that cover: mathematical modeling of minimal repair; preventive maintenance models and optimal scheduling of imperfect preventive maintenance activities; a new warranty servicing strategy with imperfect repair; mathematical models combining burn-in procedure and general maintenance policies; methods for parameters' estimation of minimal repair models; and product support. Replacement Models with Minimal Repair is for anyone with an interest in minimal repair and its impact on maintenance policies and strategies. It is a particularly useful resource for researchers, practitioners, and graduate students.

"Applications of Finite Element Methods for Reliability Studies" on ULSI Interconnections provides a detailed description of the application of finite element methods (FEMs) to the study of ULSI interconnect reliability. Over the past two decades the application of FEMs has become widespread and continues to lead to a much better understanding of reliability physics.

To help readers cope with the increasing sophistication of FEMs applications to interconnect reliability, "Applications of Finite Element Methods for Reliability Studies on ULSI Interconnections" will: introduce the principle of FEMs;review numerical modeling of ULSI interconnect reliability;describe the physical mechanism of ULSI interconnect reliability encountered in the electronics industry; anddiscuss in detail the use of FEMs to understand and improve ULSI interconnect reliability from both the physical and practical perspective, incorporating the Monte Carlo method.

A full-scale review of the numerical modeling methodology used in the study of interconnect reliability highlights useful and noteworthy techniques that have been developed recently. Many illustrations are used throughout the book to improve the reader s understanding of the methodology and its verification. Actual experimental results and micrographs on ULSI interconnects are also included.

"Applications of Finite Element Methods for Reliability Studies" on ULSI Interconnections is a good reference for researchers who are working on interconnect reliability modeling, as well as for those who want to know more about FEMs for reliability applications. It gives readers a thorough understanding of the applications of FEM to reliability modeling and an appreciation of the strengths and weaknesses of various numerical models for interconnect reliability."

Faults are a concern for Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) designers, especially if the MAS are built for industrial or military use because there must be some guarantee of dependability. Some fault classification exists for classical systems, and is used to define faults. When dependability is at stake, such fault classification may be used from the beginning of the system's conception to define fault classes and specify which types of faults are expected. Thus, one may want to use fault classification for MAS; however, From Fault Classification to Fault Tolerance for Multi-Agent Systems argues that working with autonomous and proactive agents implies a special analysis of the faults potentially occurring in the system. Moreover, the field of Fault Tolerance (FT) provides numerous methods adapted to handle different kinds of faults. Some handling methods have been studied within the MAS domain, adapting to their specificities and capabilities but increasing the large amount of FT methods. Therefore, unless being an expert in fault tolerance, it is difficult to choose, evaluate or compare fault tolerance methods, preventing a lot of developed applications from not only to being more pleasant to use but, more importantly, from at least being tolerant to common faults. From Fault Classification to Fault Tolerance for Multi-Agent Systems shows that specification phase guidelines and fault handler studies can be derived from the fault classification extension made for MAS. From this perspective, fault classification can become a unifying concept between fault tolerance methods in MAS.

Warranty Data Collection and Analysis deals with warranty data collection and analysis and the problems associated with these activities. The book is a both a research monograph and a handbook for practitioners. As a research monograph, it unifies the literature on warranty data collection and analysis, and presents the important results in an integrated manner. In the process, it highlights topics that require further research. As a handbook, it provides the essential methodology needed by practitioners involved with warranty data collection and analysis, along with extensive references to further results. Models and techniques needed for proper and effective analysis of data are included, together with guidelines for their use in warranty management, product improvement, and new product development. Warranty Data Collection and Analysis will be of interest to researchers (engineers and statisticians) and practitioners (engineers, applied statisticians, and managers) involved with product warranty and reliability. It is also suitable for use as a reference text for graduate-level reliability programs in engineering, applied statistics, operations research, and management.

Today, multi-functional materials such as piezoelectric/ferroelectric ceramics, magneto-strictive and shape memory alloys are gaining increasing applications as sensors, actuators or smart composite materials systems for emerging high tech areas. The stable performance and reliability of these smart components under complex service loads is of paramount practical importance. However, most multi-functional materials suffer from various mechanical and/or electro-magnetical degra-dation mechanisms as fatigue, damage and fracture. Therefore, this exciting topic has become a challenge to intensive international research, provoking the interdisciplinary approach between solid mechanics, materials science and physics. This book summarizes the outcome of the above mentioned IUTAM-symposium, assembling contributions by leading scientists in this area. Particularly, the following topics have been addressed: (1) Development of computational methods for coupled electromechanical field analysis, especially extended, adaptive and multi-level finite elements. (2) Constitutive modeling of non-linear smart material behavior with coupled electric, magnetic, thermal and mechanical fields, primarily based on micro-mechanical models. (3) Investigations of fracture and fatigue in piezoelectric and ferroelectric ceramics by means of process zone modeling, phase field simulation and configurational mechanics. (4) Reliability and durability of sensors and actuators under in service loading by alternating mechanical, electrical and thermal fields. (5) Experimental methods to measure fracture strength and to investigate fatigue crack growth in ferroelectric materials under electromechanical loading. (6) New ferroelectric materials, compounds and composites with enhanced strain capabilities.

Based on the author s research and practical projects, he presents a broad view of the needs and problems of the shipping industry in this area. The book covers several models and control types, developing an integrated nonlinear state-space model of the marine propulsion system.

"Risks in Technological Systems" is an interdisciplinary university textbook and a book for the educated reader on the risks of today's society. In order to understand and analyze risks associated with the engineering systems on which modern society relies, other concerns have to be addressed, besides technical aspects. In contrast to many academic textbooks dealing with technological risks, this book has a unique interdisciplinary character that presents technological risks in their own context.

Twenty-four scientists have come together to present their views on risks in technological systems. Their scientific disciplines cover not only engineering, economics and medicine, but also history, psychology, literature and philosophy. Taken together these contributions provide a broad, but accurate, interdisciplinary introduction to a field of increasing global interest, as well as rich opportunities to achieve in-depth knowledge of the subject.

International cooperation on reliability and accident data collection and processing, exchange of experience on actual uses of data and reliability engineering techniques is a major step in realising safer and more efficient industrial systems. This book provides an updated presentation of the activities in this field on a worldwide basis.