This volume presents concepts, policies and cost models for various long-term warranty and maintenance contracts. It offers several numerical examples for estimating costs to both the manufacturer and consumer. Long-term warranties and maintenance contracts are becoming increasingly popular, as these types of aftersales services provide assurance to consumers that they can enjoy long, reliable service, and protect them from defects and the potentially high costs of repairs. Studying long-term warranty and service contracts is important to manufacturers and consumers alike, as offering long-term warranty and maintenance contracts produce additional costs for manufacturers / service providers over the product's service life. These costs must be factored into the price, or the manufacturer / dealer will incur losses instead of making a profit. On the other hand, the buyer / consumer needs to weigh the cost of maintaining it over its service life and to decide whether or not these policies are worth purchasing. There are a number of complexities involved in developing failure and cost models for these policies due to uncertainties concerning the service life, usage pattern, maintenance work and long-term costs of rectifications. Mathematical models for predicting failures and expected costs for various one-dimensional long-term warranty policies are developed at the system level and analyzed by taking into account the uncertainties in connection with longer coverage periods and the rectification costs over the warranty period. Failures and costs are modeled using stochastic techniques and illustrated by means of numerical examples for estimating costs to the manufacturer and consumer. Various rectification policies are proposed and analyzed. The models developed here can be used to aid in managerial decisions on purchasing products with long-term warranty policies and maintenance contracts or outsourcing maintenance.

This book describes the basic concepts of risk and reliability with detailed descriptions of the different levels of probabilistic safety assessment of nuclear power plants (both internal and external). The book also maximizes readers insights into time dependent risk analysis through several case studies, whilst risk management with respect to non renewable energy sources is also explained. With several advanced reactors utilizing the concept of passive systems, the reliability estimation of these systems are explained in detail with the book providing a reliability estimation of components through mechanistic model approach. This book is useful for advanced undergraduate and post graduate students in nuclear engineering, aerospace engineering, industrial engineering, reliability and safety engineering, systems engineering and applied probability and statistics. This book is also suitable for one-semester graduate courses on risk management of non renewable energy systems in all conventional engineering branches like civil, mechanical, chemical, electrical and electronics as well as computer science. It will also be a valuable reference for practicing engineers, managers and researchers involved in reliability and safety activities of complex engineering systems.

This brief addresses the contextual definition of resilience, explains the existing resiliency frameworks developed by Federal Agencies, and emphasizes the risk informed approach to applying resiliency concepts to National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) documents. In an effort to assess and further define NFPA's position in the realm of resiliency, this brief identifies those provisions in NFPA codes and standards that embody the concepts of resiliency. Additionally, the brief develops an NFPA-centric definition of resiliency and compiles available information to serve as a technical reference for the codes and standards, identifying key gaps in knowledge. Key topics range from engineered features and the built environment to emergency response and risk-informed approaches to disaster events. The brief also includes a comprehensive literature review on multiple resiliency frameworks. Written for fire protection engineers and professionals who handle disaster risk assessment, this brief provides a thorough overview of resiliency concepts and how NFPA procedures strive to meet recommended standards.

This volume presents measurement uncertainty and uncertainty budgets in a form accessible to practicing engineers and engineering students from across a wide range of disciplines. The book gives a detailed explanation of the methods presented by NIST in the "GUM" - Guide to Uncertainty of Measurement. Emphasis is placed on explaining the background and meaning of the topics, while keeping the level of mathematics at the minimum level necessary. Dr. Colin Ratcliffe, USNA, and Bridget Ratcliffe, Johns Hopkins, develop uncertainty budgets and explain their use. In some examples, the budget may show a process is already adequate and where costs can be saved. In other examples, the budget may show the process is inadequate and needs improvement. The book demonstrates how uncertainty budgets help identify the most cost effective place to make changes. In addition, an extensive fully-worked case study leads readers through all issues related to an uncertainty analysis, including a variety of different types of uncertainty budgets. The book is ideal for professional engineers and students concerned with a broad range of measurement assurance challenges in applied sciences. This book also: Facilitates practicing engineers' understanding of uncertainty budgets, essential to calculating cost-effective savings to a wide variety of processes contingent on measurement Presents uncertainty budgets in an accessible style suitable for all undergraduate STEM courses that include a laboratory component Provides a highly adaptable supplement to graduate textbooks for courses where students' work includes reporting on experimental results Includes an expanded case study developing uncertainty from transducers though measurands and propagated to the final measurement that can be used as a template for the analysis of many processes Stands as a useful pocket reference for all engineers and experimental scientists

This book explains reliability techniques with examples from electronics design for the benefit of engineers. It presents the application of de-rating, FMEA, overstress analyses and reliability improvement tests for designing reliable electronic equipment. Adequate information is provided for designing computerized reliability database system to support the application of the techniques by designers. Pedantic terms and the associated mathematics of reliability engineering discipline are excluded for the benefit of comprehensiveness and practical applications. This book offers excellent support for electrical and electronics engineering students and professionals, bridging academic curriculum with industrial expectations.

This edited book contains several state-of-the-art papers devoted to econometrics of risk. Some papers provide theoretical analysis of the corresponding mathematical, statistical, computational, and economical models. Other papers describe applications of the novel risk-related econometric techniques to real-life economic situations. The book presents new methods developed just recently, in particular, methods using non-Gaussian heavy-tailed distributions, methods using non-Gaussian copulas to properly take into account dependence between different quantities, methods taking into account imprecise ("fuzzy") expert knowledge, and many other innovative techniques. This versatile volume helps practitioners to learn how to apply new techniques of econometrics of risk, and researchers to further improve the existing models and to come up with new ideas on how to best take into account economic risks.

This book describes how manufacturing enterprises, by reinforcing their existing monitoring and control of manufacturing processes, can successfully face the ever-increasing pressure from internal and external environments to maintain their competitive advantage. Numerous performance measurement systems have been elaborated to satisfy these requirements, stressing the importance of financial and operational metrics. It also highlights the fact that research on generating and linking financial and operational metrics, especially in real-time, has not garnered sufficient attention to date. The book follows an approach that integrates enterprises across different levels and departments. By computing and linking the financial and operational metrics in real-time, the book demonstrates how to provide a comprehensive view of an entire enterprise.

CMOS Test and Evaluation: A Physical Perspective is a single source for an integrated view of test and data analysis methodology for CMOS products, covering circuit sensitivities to MOSFET characteristics, impact of silicon technology process variability, applications of embedded test structures and sensors, product yield, and reliability over the lifetime of the product. This book also covers statistical data analysis and visualization techniques, test equipment and CMOS product specifications, and examines product behavior over its full voltage, temperature and frequency range.

This book discusses the latest findings towards ensuring people's safety, health, and welfare at work. It crosses different disciplines, such as work physiology, health informatics, workplace design, injury prevention, and occupational psychology. It presents new strategies for safety management, including accident prevention methods, such as performance testing and participatory ergonomics. The book, which is based on the AHFE 2016 International Conference on Safety Management and Human Factors, held on July 27-31, 2016, in Walt Disney World (R), Florida, USA, provides readers, including decision makers in government and public authorities, with a timely snapshot of the state of the art in the field of safety, health and welfare management. It also addresses agencies such as OSHA and NIOSH as well as other professionals dealing with occupational safety and health.

The aim of this book is to summarize probabilistic safety assessment (PSA) of nuclear power plants with WWER440 reactors and demonstrate that the plants are safe enough for producing energy even in light of the Fukushima accident. The book examines level 1 and 2 full power, low power and shutdown PSA, and summarizes the author's experience gained during the last 35 years in this area. It provides useful examples taken from PSA training courses the author has lectured and organized by the International Atomic Energy Agency. Such training courses were organised in Argonne National Laboratory (Chicago, IL, USA), Abdus Salaam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (Trieste, Italy), Malaysia, Vietnam and Jordan to support experts from developing countries. The role of PSA for the plants is an estimation of the risks in absolute terms and in comparison with other risks of the technical and the natural world. Plant-specific PSAs are being prepared for the plants and being applied for detection of weaknesses, design improvement and backfitting, incident analysis, accident management, emergency preparedness, prioritization of research and development and to support the regulatory activities. There are three levels of PSA, being performed for full power and low power operation and shutdown operating modes of the plants: level 1, 2 and 3 PSA. The nuclear regulatory authorities do not require the level 3 PSA for the plants in the member countries of the European Union. This means that only a limited number of NPPs in Europe have the level 3 PSA available. However, in the light of the Fukushima accident the performance of such analyses is strongly recommended in the future. This book is intended for professionals working in the nuclear industry, researchers and students interested in safety of operational plants.

The world is witnessing a rapid growth in wind and other renewable based electricity generation due to environmental concerns associated with electricity generation from the conventional sources. Wind power behaves quite differently than conventional electric power generating units due to its intermittent and diffuse nature. System planners and operators face the variability and uncertainty of wind power availability, and therefore, encounter considerable challenges in making decisions to maintain the adequacy and security of wind integrated power systems. This volume intends to bring out the original research work of researchers from academia and industry in understanding, quantifying and managing the risks associated with the uncertainty in wind variability in order to plan and operate a modern power system integrated with a significant proportion of wind power generation with an acceptable level of reliability. Accurate modeling of wind power variability and proper incorporation of the models in reliability and risk evaluation is very important for the planning and operation of electric power systems, and will play a crucial role in defining the requirement of various types of resources and services, such as storage and ancillary services in power systems.

The book summarizes the findings and contributions of the European ARTEMIS project, CESAR, for improving and enabling interoperability of methods, tools, and processes to meet the demands in embedded systems development across four domains - avionics, automotive, automation, and rail. The contributions give insight to an improved engineering and safety process life-cycle for the development of safety critical systems. They present new concept of engineering tools integration platform to improve the development of safety critical embedded systems and illustrate capacity of this framework for end-user instantiation to specific domain needs and processes. They also advance state-of-the-art in component-based development as well as component and system validation and verification, with tool support. And finally they describe industry relevant evaluated processes and methods especially designed for the embedded systems sector as well as easy adoptable common interoperability principles for software tool integration.

This SpringerBrief presents information on a wide variety of hazards and the damage potential caused by installation of a photovoltaic (PV) system. The current installation practices for PV systems on roofs create electrical, fire, structural, and weather-related hazards that do not comply to current codes, standards and guidance documents. Potential dangers include structural loading, wind loads, hail, snow, debris accumulation, seismic hazards, firefighting hazards, and electrical hazards. Despite the increased popularity of PV systems after the environmental movement, research shows that the costs of installing PV systems outweigh the benefits. Hazards of PV systems on roofs have caused several incidents in the United States; the most notable in Bakersfield, California, and Mount Holly, North Carolina. Designed for fire engineers and professionals, Best Practices for Commercial Roof-Mounted Photovoltaic System Installation offers recommendations to set up PV systems safely and sustainably.

This monograph presents an analysis of construction safety problems and on-site safety measures from an economist's point of view. The book includes examples from both emerging countries, e.g. China and India, and developed countries, e.g. Australia and Hong Kong. Moreover, the author covers an analysis on construction safety knowledge sharing by means of updatable mobile technology such as apps in Androids and iOS platform mobile devices. The target audience comprises primarily researchers and experts in the field but the book may also be beneficial for graduate students.

Though the game-theoretic approach has been vastly studied and utilized in relation to economics of industrial organizations, it has hardly been used to tackle safety management in multi-plant chemical industrial settings. Using Game Theory for Improving Safety within Chemical Industrial Parks presents an in-depth discussion of game-theoretic modeling which may be applied to improve cross-company prevention and -safety management in a chemical industrial park. By systematically analyzing game-theoretic models and approaches in relation to managing safety in chemical industrial parks, Using Game Theory for Improving Safety within Chemical Industrial Parks explores the ways game theory can predict the outcome of complex strategic investment decision making processes involving several adjacent chemical plants. A number of game-theoretic decision models are discussed to provide strategic tools for decision-making situations. Offering clear and straightforward explanations of methodologies, Using Game Theory for Improving Safety within Chemical Industrial Parks provides managers and management teams with approaches to asses situations and to improve strategic safety- and prevention arrangements.

This book investigates the feasibility of developing a tool that enables fire departments to estimate the value of their services to a community in terms of environmental and financial impact. This book provides a summary of this effort, which resulted in development of a prototype tool for fire department use. The impact of fire on a community is usually measured in terms of the number of fires, human casualties, and property damage. There are, however, more subtle impacts of fire that are not so easily estimated but contribute to the measure of overall performance of the fire service in protecting a community. While environmental and economic impact assessment methodologies exist as separate systems, they generally require a high level of knowledge that is outside the scope of most fire departments. A relatively simple methodology for estimating the environmental and economic impact of fires helps communities understand the degree to which fire department activities can benefit a community's environmental and economic well-being. The scope and approach for this prototype tool is explained, including risk assessment, cost benefit analysis, life cycle assessment, integration and implementation, and sensitivity and uncertainty analysis. It includes multiple case studies and offers statistical support for future expansion of the tool. Fire service professionals will find this a useful new approach to presenting value in a community, as well as a method for examining their own financial and environmental plans.

"An Industrial Product-Service System is characterized by the integrated and mutually determined planning, development, provision and use of product and service shares including its immanent software components in Business-to-Business applications and represents a knowledge-intensive socio-technical system." - Meier, Roy, Seliger (2010) Since the first conference in 2009, the CIRP International Conference on Industrial Product-Service Systems has become a well-established international forum for the review and discussion of advances, research results and industrial improvements. Researchers from all over the world have met at previous IPS(2) conferences in Cranfield (2009), Linkoeping (2010), Braunschweig (2011) and Tokyo (2012). In 2013, the 5th CIRP International Conference on Industrial Product-Service Systems is held in Bochum. Important topics of IPS(2) research presented at the conference are: planning and development, sustainability, business models, operation, service engineering, knowledge management, ICT, modeling and simulation, marketing and economic aspects as well as the role of the human in IPS(2).

Efficient and equitable policies for managing disaster risks and adapting to global environmental change are critically dependent on development of robust options supported by integrated modeling. The book is based on research and state-of-the art models developed at IIASA (International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis) and within its cooperation network. It addresses the methodological complexities of assessing disaster risks, which call for stochastic simulation, optimization methods and economic modeling. Furthermore, it describes policy frameworks for integrated disaster risk management, including stakeholder participation facilitated by user-interactive decision-support tools. Applications and results are presented for a number of case studies at different problem scales and in different socio-economic contexts, and their implications for loss sharing policies and economic development are discussed. Among others, the book presents studies for insurance policies for earthquakes in the Tuscany region in Italy and flood risk in the Tisza river basin in Hungary. Further, it investigates the economic impact of natural disasters on development and possible financial coping strategies; and applications are shown for selected South Asian countries. The book is addressed both to researchers and to organizations involved with catastrophe risk management and risk mitigation policies.

Flash floods typically develop in a period a few hours or less and can arise from heavy rainfall and other causes, such as dam or flood defence breaches, and ice jam breaks. The rapid development, often associated with a high debris content, can present a considerable risk to people and property. This book describes recent developments in techniques for monitoring and forecasting the development of flash floods, and providing flood warnings. Topics which are discussed include rainfall and river monitoring, nowcasting, Numerical Weather Prediction, rainfall-runoff modelling, and approaches to the dissemination of flood warnings and provision of an emergency response. The book is potentially useful on civil engineering, water resources, meteorology and hydrology courses (and for post graduate studies) but is primarily intended as a review of the topic for a wider audience.

This volume presents selected papers from the International Conference on Reliability, Safety, and Hazard. It presents the latest developments in reliability engineering and probabilistic safety assessment, and brings together contributions from a diverse international community and covers all aspects of safety, reliability, and hazard assessment across a host of interdisciplinary applications. This book will be of interest to researchers in both academia and the industry.

Quality is not a fixed or universal property of software; it depends on the context and goals of its stakeholders. Hence, when you want to develop a high-quality software system, the first step must be a clear and precise specification of quality. Yet even if you get it right and complete, you can be sure that it will become invalid over time. So the only solution is continuous quality control: the steady and explicit evaluation of a product's properties with respect to its updated quality goals. This book guides you in setting up and running continuous quality control in your environment. Starting with a general introduction on the notion of quality, it elaborates what the differences between process and product quality are and provides definitions for quality-related terms often used without the required level of precision. On this basis, the work then discusses quality models as the foundation of quality control, explaining how to plan desired product qualities and how to ensure they are delivered throughout the entire lifecycle. Next it presents the main concepts and techniques of continuous quality control, discussing the quality control loop and its main techniques such as reviews or testing. In addition to sample scenarios in all chapters, the book is rounded out by a dedicated chapter highlighting several applications of different subsets of the presented quality control techniques in an industrial setting. The book is primarily intended for practitioners working in software engineering or quality assurance, who will benefit by learning how to improve their current processes, how to plan for quality, and how to apply state-of-the-art quality control techniques. Students and lecturers in computer science and specializing in software engineering will also profit from this book, which they can use in practice-oriented courses on software quality, software maintenance and quality assurance.

Asset Condition, Information Systems and Decision Models, is the second volume of the Engineering Asset Management Review Series. The manuscripts provide examples of implementations of asset information systems as well as some practical applications of condition data for diagnostics and prognostics. The increasing trend is towards prognostics rather than diagnostics, hence the need for assessment and decision models that promote the conversion of condition data into prognostic information to improve life-cycle planning for engineered assets. The research papers included here serve to support the on-going development of Condition Monitoring standards. This volume comprises selected papers from the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd World Congresses on Engineering Asset Management, which were convened under the auspices of ISEAM in collaboration with a number of organisations, including CIEAM Australia, Asset Management Council Australia, BINDT UK, and Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing University of Chemical Technology, China. Asset Condition, Information Systems and Decision Models will be of particular interest to finance, maintenance, and operations personnel whose roles directly affect the capability value of engineering asset base, as well as asset managers in both industry and government.

Guaranteeing a high system performance over a wide operating range is an important issue surrounding the design of automatic control systems with successively increasing complexity. As a key technology in the search for a solution, advanced fault detection and identification (FDI) is receiving considerable attention. This book introduces basic model-based FDI schemes, advanced analysis and design algorithms, and mathematical and control-theoretic tools. This second edition of Model-Based Fault Diagnosis Techniques contains: * new material on fault isolation and identification and alarm management; * extended and revised treatment of systematic threshold determination for systems with both deterministic unknown inputs and stochastic noises; * addition of the continuously-stirred tank heater as a representative process-industrial benchmark; and * enhanced discussion of residual evaluation which now deals with stochastic processes. Model-based Fault Diagnosis Techniques will interest academic researchers working in fault identification and diagnosis and as a text it is suitable for graduate students in a formal university-based course or as a self-study aid for practising engineers working with automatic control or mechatronic systems from backgrounds as diverse as chemical process and power engineering.

21 years ago it was a joint idea with Hans Rottenkolber to organize a workshop dedicated to the discussion of the latest results in the automatic processing of fringe patterns. This idea was promoted by the insight that automatic and high precision phase measurement techniques will play a key role in all future industrial and scientific applications of optical metrology. A couple of months later more than 50 specialists from East and West met in East Berlin, the capital of the former GDR, to spend 3 days with the discussion of new principles of fringe processing. In the stimulating atmoshere the idea was born to repeat the workshop and to organize the meeting in an olympic schedule. And thus meanwhile 20 years have been passed and we have today Fringe number six. However, such a workshop takes place in a dynamic environment. Therefore the main topics of the previous events were always adapted to the most interesting subjects of the new period. In 1993 the workshop took place in Bremen and was dedicated to new principles of optical shape measurement, setup calibration, phase unwrapping and nondestructive testing, while in 1997 new approaches in multi-sensor metrology, active measurement strategies and hybrid processing technologies played a central role. 2001, the first meeting in the 21st century, was focused to optical methods for micromeasurements, hybrid measurement technologies and new sensor solutions for industrial inspection.

Synthetic biology is becoming one of the most dynamic new fields of biology, with the potential to revolutionize the way we do biotechnology today. By applying the toolbox of engineering disciplines to biology, a whole set of potential applications become possible ranging very widely across scientific and engineering disciplines. Some of the potential benefits of synthetic biology, such as the development of low-cost drugs or the production of chemicals and energy by engineered bacteria are enormous. There are, however, also potential and perceived risks due to deliberate or accidental damage. Also, ethical issues of synthetic biology just start being explored, with hardly any ethicists specifically focusing on the area of synthetic biology. This book will be the first of its kind focusing particularly on the safety, security and ethical concerns and other relevant societal aspects of this new emerging field. The foreseen impact of this book will be to stimulate a debate on these societal issues at an early stage. Past experiences, especially in the field of GM-crops and stem cells, have shown the importance of an early societal debate. The community and informed stakeholders recognize this need, but up to now discussions are fragmentary. This book will be the first comprehensive overview on relevant societal issues of synthetic biology, setting the scene for further important discussions within the scientific community and with civil society.