The concept of the survival signature has recently attracted increasing attention for performing reliability analysis on systems with multiple types of components. It opens a new pathway for a structured approach with high computational efficiency based on a complete probabilistic description of the system. In practical applications, however, some of the parameters of the system might not be de...

BACKGROUND Physical therapists often assess patient independence through observation; however, it is not known if therapists make these judgments reliably. We have developed a standardized method to assess a patient's ability to perform his or her treatment program independently. OBJECTIVES To develop a standardized assessment of patient independence in performance of a treatment program and ...

In this paper a knowledge-based clustered partitioning technique is developed for determining reliability index and failure probability of rock wedge. Here, the a reliability index is analyzed and the optimization is carried out using a knowledge-based clustered partitioning (KCP) technique. The reliability index computed with this KCP technique is compared with those using other approaches suc...

INTRODUCTION Despite the widespread use of deprivation indices in public health, they are rarely explicitly or extensively validated, owing to the complex nature of the exercise. METHODS Based on the proposals of British researchers, we sought to validate Quebec's material and social deprivation index using criteria of validity (content, criterion and construct validity), reliability and resp...

reliability wiener number is a modification of the original wiener number in which probabilities are assigned to edges yielding a natural model in which there are some (or all) bonds in the molecule that are not static. various probabilities naturally allow modelling different types of chemical bonds because chemical bonds are of different types and it is well-known that under certain condition...

This paper proposes a reliability importance index that is possible to extract from existing reliability simulations at a low additional computational cost. The index utilizes the concept of reliability worth as a measure of system reliability in order to establish the importance of components in systems with several load points. Since the method is based on simulations, it is suitable for larg...

Formulation of structural reliability requires selection of probabilistic or physical models, which usually involve parameters to be estimated through statistical inference — a process that invariably introduces uncertainties in parameter estimates. The measure of reliability that incorporates these parameter uncertainties is termed the predictive reliability index. Methods for computing this m...

While sophisticated analytical methods like Morgenstern-Price or finite elementmethods are available for more realistic analysis of stability of slopes, assessment of the exactvalues of soil parameters is practically impossible. Uncertainty in the soil parameters arisesfrom two different sources: scatter in data and systematic error inherent in the estimate of soilproperties. Hence, stability o...