The maintenance of systems in engineering is of increasing concern to managers and designers in all branches of engineering, whether they are producing high-quality products or designing highly-reliable systems. In recent decades, reliability theory has produced many innovations in maintenance policy.

Maintenance Theory of Reliability is a survey of useful and practical maintenance models covering replacement, preventive maintenance and inspection.

The book provides a detailed introduction to maintenance policies, updates the reader on the current status of the field and indicates future directions. The reader will learn the theory of maintenance and how to apply models in practice. The book will serve as an essential reference for graduate students and researchers in reliability theory and a useful guide for reliability engineers engaged in maintenance work.

The Springer Series in Reliability Engineering publishes high-quality books in important areas of current theoretical research and development in reliability, and in areas that bridge the gap between theory and application in areas of interest to practitioners in industry, laboratories, business, and government.

Autorentext

Toshio Nakagawa is Professor of Engineering at Aichi Institute of Technology. He is considered the world leader in maintenance reliability engineering and has worked in this area for thirty years. Professor Nakagawa was an invited contributor of one of the key chapters of Springer's recent Handbook of Reliability Engineering (1-85233-453-3, 2003).

Zusammenfassung
Many serious accidents have happened in the world where systems have been large-scale and complex, and have caused heavy damage and a social sense of instability. Furthermore, advanced nations have almost ?nished public inf- structureandrushedintoamaintenanceperiod.Maintenancewillbemore- portant than production, manufacture, and construction, that is, more ma- tenance for environmental considerations and for the protection of natural resources. From now on, the importance of maintenance will increase more and more. In the past four decades, valuable contributions to maintenance policies in reliability theory have been made. This book is intended to s- marize the research results studied mainly by the author in the past three decades. The book deals primarily with standard to advanced problems of main- nance policies for system reliability models. System reliability can be mainly improved by repair and preventive maintenance, and replacement, and rel- bility properties can be investigated by using stochastic process techniques. The optimum maintenance policies for systems that minimize or maximize appropriate objective functions under suitable conditions are discussed both analytically and practically. The book is composed of nine chapters. Chapter 1 is devoted to an int- duction to reliability theory, and brie?y reviews stochastic processes needed for reliability and maintenance theory. Chapter 2 summarizes the results of repair maintenance, which is the most basic maintenance in reliability. The repair maintenance of systems such as the one-unit system and multiple-unit redundant systems is treated. Chapters 3 through 5 summarize the results of three typical maintenance policies of age, periodic, and block replacements.

Inhalt
Repair Maintenance.- Age Replacement.- Periodic Replacement.- Block Replacement.- Preventive Maintenance.- Imperfect Preventive Maintenance.- Inspection Policies.- Modified Maintenance Models.