Due to shrinking feature size and significant reduction in noise margins, nanoscale circuits have become more susceptible to manufacturing defects, noise-related transient faults and interference from radiation. Traditionally, soft errors have been a much greater concern in memories than in logic circuits. However, as technology continues to scale, logic circuits are becoming more susceptible t...

{ A computation task running in distributed systems can be represented as a directed graph H(V; E) whose vertices and edges may fail with known probabilities. In this paper, we introduce a reliability measure, called distributed task reliability, to model the reliability of such computation tasks. The distributed task reliability is deened to be the probability that the task can be successfully...

The most common approach to assess the safety of a bridge is load rating. However, this approach cannot quantify the bridge safety in probabilistic terms or fully quantify the structural risk to the bridge. Reliability methods have become an increasingly popular and gradually accepted approach to assess the safety of structures. These methods account for the randomness and correlation of all re...

During the design stage, realistic life time predictions for components help to reduce test cycles and allow for an optimization with respect to both production and repair costs (see e.g. Schuëller et al. 1996). Accurate predictions of the mean life time and its standard deviation can be obtained from a fracture mechanics approach that takes the uncertainties in the material parameters into acc...

Failure data on mobile robots is critical for three reasons: to support the theory of autonomous fault detection, identification, and recovery necessary for success in new domains; provide design and manufacturing feedback to the robotics community; and permit project managers to accurately create development schedules. The failures considered in this paper occurred over a period of 2 years, in...

Bayesian network (BN) models gain more and more popularity in reliability analysis. In this talk I will consider some of the properties of BNs that have made them popular, consider some of the recent developments, and also point to some open problems.

For many researchers, the literature of reliability coefficients seems bewildering although the methodological problem in which they are embedded is reasonably clear: Since we can never know what it is that we claim to see independent of our seeing it, or, translated into the language of science, since we can not test hypotheses about reality without first generating the observations or data to...

The problem of medical error in healthcare is well documented. It is estimated that tens of thousands of people die annually from preventable medical error. For over ten years, a traditional Human Reliability Analysis (HRA) technique, the Root Cause Analysis (RCA) has been used in hospitals nationwide in an attempt to explain why these errors occur and what can be done to prevent them. Still, p...

As wireless sensor networks find wide applications nowadays, reliability analysis of them is necessary before commercial deployment of the same. Unpredictable environmental noise, presence of obstacle in signal path, effect of natural phenomena like earthquake or flood severely affects performance of sensor networks. This motivates reliability analysis of them. So, in this thesis we calculate s...