RELIABILITY of TECHNOLOGIES Technology ' s Dynamic Behavior Explained Yair

Technology has been an inseparable element of the human culture since the dawn of history. Having synergetic relations with science, economic growth and welfare, technology and its artifacts have expressed a measure of the human progress. The accelerating pace of technological advancements and revolutionary leaps are extensively investigated in the social sciences whereas the engineering characteristics of the technological representatives, i.e. of the products, lie in the physical domain. A literature review shows vague perceptions of the term Technology in different disciplines, all are non-measurable and literally or descriptively defined. This research thesis identifies the dynamics of technological evolution in several layers of existence and aims at the construction of generalized holistic quantitative models for these dynamics. The holistic essence of the research approach is a prime philosophic course of the analysis. It is the idea that higher-level properties of a system cannot be satisfactorily determined, explained and described by the behavior of the lower-level component parts alone and that new properties emerge. In that sense, technologies are complex systems comprise of numerous products, human users and a complex net of production, sales and maintenance. They also include different sub technologies, i.e. species, of different products which bear different environmental stress conditions, usage profiles and maintenance policies. This research thesis is wrapping up all these into generalizing models, implemented on the basis of reliability theory and mathematics. Firstly, high-level-performance-functions describe the holistic performance of all species' members within a relatively short period. The second part of the research investigates the dynamics, not only of the time to failure distributions, but also, and in particular, of the damage accumulation process, known as the aging phenomenon. The last part of the thesis examines technological revolutions in historical scale. Some new ideas and theorems are also discussed within the thesis regarding the birth of new technologies and their structure.