Every parent is concerned when a child is slow to become a mature adult. This is also true for any product designer, regardless of their industry sector. For a product to be mature, it must have an expected level of reliability from the moment it is put into service, and must maintain this level throughout its industrial use. While there have been theoretical and practical advances in reliability from the 1960s to the end of the 1990s, to take into account the effect of maintenance, the maturity of a product is often only partially addressed. Product Maturity 1 fills this gap as much as possible; a difficult exercise given that maturity is a transverse activity in the engineering sciences; it must be present throughout the lifecycle of a product.

Today, the reliability of systems has become a major issue in most industrial applications. The theoretical approach to estimating reliability was largely developed in the 1960s for maintenance-free systems, and more recently, in the late 1990s, it was developed for maintenance-based systems. Customers' expectations concerning reliability (as well as maintenance, safety, etc.) are growing ever more demanding over the generations of systems. However, the theoretical methods used to handle the systems are not suitable when aging mechanisms are present. This book proposes a theoretical approach to estimate all of these quantities correctly. In addition to the theoretical aspect, it details a number of issues that any industrial system will meet sooner or later, whether due to design flaws, the batch of components, manufacturing problems or new technologies that result in the aging of mechanisms during their operational use.