Reliability Analysis and Asset Management of Engineering Systems explains methods that can be used to evaluate reliability and availability of complex systems, including simulation-based methods. The increasing digitization of mechanical processes driven by Industry 4.0 increases the interaction between machines and monitoring and control systems, leading to increases in system complexity. For those systems the reliability and availability analyses are increasingly challenging, as the interaction between machines has become more complex, and the analysis of the flexibility of the production systems to respond to machinery failure may require advanced simulation techniques. This book fills a gap on how to deal with such complex systems by linking the concepts of systems reliability and asset management, and then making these solutions more accessible to industry by explaining the availability analysis of complex systems based on simulation methods that emphasise Petri nets.

The analysis of the reliability and availability of power plants is frequently based on simple indexes that do not take into account the criticality of some failures used for availability analysis. This criticality should be evaluated based on concepts of reliability which consider the effect of a component failure on the performance of the entire plant. System reliability analysis tools provide a root-cause analysis leading to the improvement of the plant maintenance plan. Taking in view that the power plant performance can be evaluated not only based on thermodynamic related indexes, such as heat-rate, Thermal Power Plant Performance Analysis focuses on the presentation of reliability-based tools used to define performance of complex systems and introduces the basic concepts of reliability, maintainability and risk analysis aiming at their application as tools for power plant performance improvement, including: * selection of critical equipment and components, * definition of maintenance plans, mainly for auxiliary systems, and * execution of decision analysis based on risk concepts. The comprehensive presentation of each analysis allows future application of the methodology making Thermal Power Plant Performance Analysis a key resource for undergraduate and postgraduate students in mechanical and nuclear engineering.