IIE Transactions articles from January 2009

IIE Transactions archives from January 2009

Foreword.(reliability engineering)
January 1, 2009... The Editors of the IIE Transactions and its editorial board oftentimes initiate Special Issues on emerging research areas, or topics in a well-established area. In other cases, the Special Issue is dedicated to honor a founder and a leading...

A simple universal generating function method for estimating the reliability of general multi-state node networks.
January 1, 2009... 1. Introduction Ever since the initial development of reliability engineering, network reliability has been an area of considerable research activity. Network reliability theory has been extensively applied to many real-world systems...

Probability, chance and the probability of chance.
January 1, 2009... 1. Probability and chance 1.1. Introduction: Statement of the problem and objectives Consider the following archetypal problem that commonly arises in the contexts of biomedicine, engineering and the physical sciences. Suppose that...

Mobility and reliability modeling for a mobile ad hoc network.
January 1, 2009... 1. Introduction Perkins and Bhagwat (2001) and Toh (2002) were the first to describe the Mobile Ad hoc Wireless Network (MAWN) which is a rapidly developing technology. These authors provide examples of the applications for which MAWNs are...

Multi-state k-out-of-n systems and their Performance evaluation.
January 1, 2009... 1. Introduction The k-out-of-n system structure is a very popular type of redundancy in fault-tolerant systems, and finds wide application in both industrial and military systems. Examples of such fault-tolerant systems include the...

A level-dependent general discrete system involving phase-type distributions.
January 1, 2009... 1. Introduction In the literature on reliability the considered distribution functions are frequently continuous. Lifetime models are then selected from several distributions that have proved useful in practical applications, such as the...

The mean function of a repairable system that is subjected to an imperfect repair policy.
January 1, 2009... 1. Introduction Consider a repairable system which is maintained and repaired upon each failure. Let the counting process {N(t); t [greater than or equal to] 0} be the number of failures in the interval [0, t]. We refer to the process...

Optimum problems in backward times of reliability models.
January 1, 2009... 1. Introduction The most important problem in reliability theory is to estimate statistically at what time an operating unit will fail in the near future. Using such a reliability point of view, failure distributions and their parameters...

Modeling of dependent competing risks by first passage times of Wiener processes.
January 1, 2009... 1. Introduction The idea of competing risks is to model the situation where units are exposed to several risks and fail due to one of them. We observe two random variables for each individual, (Y, [delta]), where Y is the time to failure...

A new simulation approach to estimating expected values of functions of Bernoulli random variables under certain types of dependencies.
January 1, 2009... 1. Introduction Consider an n-component system, where each component either works or is failed. Let [X.sub.i] equal one if component i works and zero otherwise. For a non-decreasing function h([x.sub.1],...,[x.sub.n]), defined on...

Conceptualistic pragmatism: a framework for Bayesian analysis?
January 1, 2009... 1. Background Some years ago Richard E. Barlow wrote the book Reliability Engineering (Barlow, 1998), where he took a subjectivist approach based on basic engineering judgements, from which engineering decisions, based on Bayesian belief...