What is reliability? Reliability refers to the ability of a system, product, or service to perform its intended function, under specified conditions, for a given period of time.  For example, if a watch works precisely for 10 years, it can be considered as reliable. Reliability plays an important role in ensuring the field performance of a product. Poor reliability leads to malfunction, task delay, unexpected maintenance and cost, even disasters that cause the loss of human lives or assets.

So, it is important to strengthen the reliability throughout product life cycle. This includes various reliability activities to be taken, such as reliability modeling, analysis, design, testing, evaluation, and management. This course, Principles of System Reliability, is designed to introduce all these reliability activities systematically. After learning the course, you will master the principles of reliability, and the knowledge and skills to analyze and solve engineering cases in the perspective of reliability.

This course is proposed to students subjected in Industrial Engineering and some other related areas.

Welcome to this course, Principles of System Reliability! I am Dr. Ping Jiang, from National University of Defense Technology.

本课程全面介绍了可靠性的相关概念、可靠性的7种经典模型、可靠性分析方法（包括故障模式影响分析和故障树分析）、可靠性设计（包括可靠性预计与分配和设计方法）、可靠性试验（包括试验的分类和增长试验、加速试验、鉴定试验等常用的试验类型）、可靠性评估（包括基于大样本和小样本的单元可靠性评估和系统可靠性评估）以及可靠性管理，共七章25节课。本课程的特点是：一是所讲内容覆盖了开展可靠性研究和实践必须掌握的基础知识，内容通用性强，通过大量的案例来介绍基础理论，浅显易懂；二是采用全英文授课，中英双字幕，方便国内外学生的学习。

After learning the course, you will master:

1. The definitions of

reliability and some related terms, such as availability, maintainability, safety, etc. Reliability indices and lifetime distributions;

2. The most widely used reliability models;

3. Reliability analysis methods: Failure Mode Effects Analysis (FMEA) and Fault Tree Analysis (FTA);

4. Design for Reliability: Reliability Allocation, Reliability Prediction and DFR methods;

5. Reliability testing methods, such as Environment Stress Screening (ESS), Reliability Growth Testing (RGT), Reliability Qualification Testing (RQT), etc;

6. Reliability evaluation methods, in cases of large sample size and small sample size.

In a word, you can master the knowledge and skills to analyze and solve reliability problems in engineering.

Ping Jiang, Yunyan Xing, Bo Guo, Wenke Cheng. An Introduction to Reliability Engineering[M]. Beijing：National Defense Industry Press，2015.10.