The purpose of this paper is to introduce a proportional reversed hazard rate model, in contrast to the celebrated proportional hazard model, and study some of its structural properties. Some criteria of ageing are presented and the inheritance of the ageing notions (of the base line distribution) by the proposed model are studied. Two important data sets are analyzed: one uncensored and the other having some censored observations. In both cases, the confidence bands for the failure rate and survival function are investigated. In one case the failure rate is bathtub shaped and in the other it is upside bath tub shaped and thus the failure rates are non-monotonic even though the baseline failure rate is monotonic. In addition, the estimates of the turning points of the failure rates are provided.

This Paper proposes a new methodology for assessing the reliability of an accident management, which Is based on the reliability physics and the scheme to generate dynamic event tree. The methodology consists of 3 main steps: screening; uncertainty propagation; and probability estimation. Sensitivity analysis is used for screening the variables of significance. Latin Hypercube sampling technique and MAAP code are used for uncertainty propagation, and the dynamic event tree generation method is used for the estimation of non-success probability of implementing an accident management strategy. This approach is applied in assessing the non-success probability of implementing a cavity flooding strategy, which is to supply water into the reactor cavity using emergency fire systems during the sequence of station blackout at the reference plant.

This paper presents a new dynamic human reliability analysis method and its application for quantifying the human error probabilities in implementing management action. For comparisons of current HRA methods with the new method, the characteristics of THERP, HCR, and SLIM-MAUD, which are most frequency used method in PSAs, are discussed. The action associated with implementation of the cavity flooding during a station blackout sequence is considered for its application. This method is based on the concepts of the quantified correlation between the performance requirement and performance achievement. The MAAP 3.0B code and Latin Hypercube sampling technique are used to determine the uncertainty of the performance achievement parameter. Meanwhile, the value of the performance requirement parameter is obtained from interviews. Based on these stochastic obtained, human error probabilities are calculated with respect to the various means and variances of the things. It is shown that this method is very flexible in that it can be applied to any kind of the operator actions, including the actions associated with the implementation of accident management strategies.

In this paper we consider empirical Bayes estimation of the hazard rate and survival probabilities with right censored data under the assumption that the hazard function is constant over the period of observation and the prior distribution is gamma. We provide an estimator of the first derivative of the prior moment generating function that converges at each point to the true value in $L_2$ and use it to obtain, easy to compute, asymptotically optimal estimators under the squared error loss function.

Global competition to increase production output and to improve quality is spurring manufacturing companies to use condition monitoring and fault diagnostic systems for predictive maintenance. As monitoring, testing, and measuring techniques develop, predictive control of components and complete systems have become more practical and affordable. In this article, we will consider the computer based data acquisition system for condition monitoring and the condition parameter analysis techniques for fault detection and diagnostics in the machinery and briefly discuss reliability prediction and the limit value determination in condition monitoring.

A network, where links have different capacities, is considered to be in functioning state if a specified amount of flow can be transmitted through the network. In this paper, we consider the measures of importance of a link in such networks. We define the structural importance and reliability importance of a link when the required amount of flow is given. We also present the performability importance, which can be used to determine which links should be improved first in order to make the greatest improvement in the expected maximum flow of network. Numerical examples are presented as well for illustrative purpose.