Reliability engineering is a field focused on ensuring that engineered systems, products, and services reliably meet their requirements over their intended operating lifespan. It can involve the use of specialized engineering technologies, techniques, and analysis, such as system-level reliability analysis, fault tree analysis, and specialist software engineering tools. Reliability engineering ensures that an engineered system, product, or service meets its operational goals and meets user or customer requirements.
The primary objective of reliability engineering is to ensure that an engineered system or component performs as expected over its lifetime. It involves assessing risks and reducing them as much as possible in order to minimize potential failure. The aim is to ensure that any manufactured items, such as electronic gadgets, can be used with a minimum of risk and greater system performance.
Reliability engineering includes the following components:
• Identifying and eliminating potential causes of failure
• Estimating system reliability and performance characteristics
• Robust design methodology
• Test design and validation methods
• Safety engineering
• Failure modes and effects analysis (FMEA)
• Risk assessment
When applied to the field of computers and information technology, reliability engineering includes analysis and achievable goals, such as determining optimal system outage time, system latency, database availability, and minimizing system downtime.
Reliability engineering has been applied to a variety of industries and applications. It is used in fields such as engineering design, manufacturing, software development and telecoms. It is a particularly important facet of engineering, as it can be used to improve the quality, performance, and safety of products and services. It can also reduce the costs associated with components and equipment by anticipating and preventing failures.
