Table Of ContentHandbook of Performability Engineering
Krishna B. Misra
Editor
Handbook of
Performability Engineering
123
Professor Krishna B. Misra
Principal Consultant
RAMS Consultants
71 Vrindaban Vihar, Ajmer Road
Jaipur-302019 (Rajasthan)
India
[email protected]
ISBN 978-1-84800-130-5 e-ISBN 978-1-84800-131-2
DOI 10.1007/978-1-84800-131-2
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
The handbook of performability engineering
1. Reliability (Engineering)
I. Misra, Krishna B., 1943-
620'.0045
ISBN-13: 9781848001305
Library of Congress Control Number: 2008931851
© 2008 Springer-Verlag London Limited
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any
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This handbook is dedicated very fondly to
my grandson and to my lovely grandchildren
Meesha and Meera Trivedi,
Paridhi Misra,
Cyrus, Anushka and Xenia Chinoy,
and to their successive generations,
who will be the beneficiaries of the concepts
presented in this handbook
in sustaining humanity on this beautiful planet, Earth
and in preserving its environment for the future.
Foreword
The editor of the Handbook of Performability Engineering, Dr. Krishna B. Misra, a retired eminent
professor of the Indian Institute of Technology, took to reliability nearly four decades ago and is a
renowned scholar of reliability. Professor Misra was awarded a plaque by the IEEE Reliability Society in
1995 “in recognition of his meritorious and outstanding contributions to reliability engineering and
furthering of reliability engineering education and development in India”. Upon his retirement in 2005
from IIT, Kharagpur, where he established the first ever postgraduate course on reliability engineering in
India in 1982, and Reliability Engineering Centre in 1983, he launched the International Journal of
Performability Engineering in 2005 and has since led the journal as its inaugural Editor-in-Chief.
Two years after successfully establishing the International Journal of Performability Engineering,
Prof. Misra has now taken up the responsibility of editing the Handbook of Performability Engineering,
which is being published by Springer. The timely publication of this handbook necessarily reflects the
changing scenario of the 21st century’s holistic view of designing, producing and using products, systems,
or services which satisfy the performance requirements of a customer to the best possible extent.
The word “performability” was not commonly used or found in the reliability dictionary until its first
use was made in 1978 by John Meyer in the context of performance (meaning reliability and
maintainability) evaluation of aircraft control computers at NASA. However, Professor Misra has
extended the use of word performability to reflect an amalgamation of reliability and other reliability-
related performance attributes, such as quality, availability, maintainability, dependability, and
sustainability. Therefore, performability can be considered as the best and most appropriate means to
extend the meaning of effectiveness and overall performance of a modern complex and complicated
system in which mechanical, electrical, and biological elements become increasingly harder to
differentiate.
Having reviewed the contents of this voluminous handbook, and its contributed chapters, I find that it
clearly covers the entire canvas of performability: quality, reliability, maintainability, safety, and
sustainability. I understand that the motivation for this handbook came from the editorial that Dr. Misra
wrote in the very first issue of the International Journal of Performability. The handbook addresses how
today’s systems need to be not only dependable (implying survivability and safety) but also sustainable.
Modern systems need to be addressed in a practical way instead of simply as a mathematical abstract,
often bearing no physical meaning at all. In fact, performability engineering not only aims at producing
products, systems, and services that are dependable but also involves developing economically viable and
safe processes of modern technologies, including clean production that entails minimal environmental
pollution. Performability engineering extends the traditionally defined performance requirements to
incorporate the modern notion of requiring optimal quantities of material and energy in order to yield safe
viii Foreword
and reliable products that can be disposed of without causing any adverse effects on the environment at
the end of their life cycle.
The chapters included in this handbook have undergone a thorough review and have been carefully
devised. These chapters collectively address the issues related to performability engineering. I expect that
the handbook will create an interest in performability and will bring about the intended interaction
between various players of performability engineering.
I am glad to write the Foreword and firmly believe that this handbook will be widely used by
practising engineers as well as serve as a guide to students and teachers with an interest in conducting
research in the totality of performance requirements of the modern systems of practical use. I would like
to congratulate Dr. Misra for taking the bold initiative of editing this historical volume.
July 24, 2007 Way Kuo
President of City University of Hong Kong
Editor-in-Chief, IEEE Transactions on Reliability
Prologue
Performability Engineering: Its Promise and Challenge
Performability engineering has as its scope the evaluation of all aspects of system performance. This
encompasses the evaluation of the reliability of the system, its costs, its sustainability, its quality, its
safety, its risk, and all of its performance outputs. In covering this broad scope, the objective is to provide
a unified framework for comparing and integrating all aspects of system performance. This provides the
manager and decision-maker with a complete, consistent picture of the system. This is the promise and
exciting prospect of performability engineering.
The challenge involves unifying the diversity of the different disciplines that performability
engineering covers. These disciplines cover reliability analysis, cost analysis, quality analysis, safety
analysis, risk analysis, performance output analysis, not to mention data analysis, statistical analysis, and
decision analysis. The challenge is to provide a unified framework for these different disciplines so that
there is cohesiveness in the interfaces between the disciplines.
The first step in meeting this challenge is to provide a common portal through which workers in these
diverse disciplines can contribute their ideas and work. This was implemented by the introduction of the
International Journal of Performability Engineering, whose Editor-in-Chief is Professor Krishna B. Misra,
who is also the inspiration and driver for the Handbook of Performability Engineering. This Handbook of
Performability Engineering is another important step in addressing the challenge by presenting an
integrated collection of chapters on the various disciplines and topics covered by performability
engineering.
The chapters included in this handbook are diverse and represent the vitality of the different aspects of
performability engineering. There are management-oriented chapters on the roles of reliability, safety,
quality assurance, risk management, and performance management in the realm of performability
management. There are chapters providing overview and the state-of-the-art on basic approaches being
used in various disciplines. There are original technical contributions describing new methods and tools.
Finally, there are chapters focusing on design and operational applications. The reader therefore has a
veritable garden from which to feast from in impressive collection of chapters in the handbook.
In short, it is expected that this handbook will be found to be very useful by practicing engineers and
researchers of the 21st century in pursuing this challenging and relevant area for sustainable development.
William Vesely, Ph.D.
Manager, Risk Assessment, Office of Safety and Mission Assurance
NASA Headquarters, 300 E Street SW,Washington, DC 20546
Preface
This handbook is unique in many respects. First of all, the title and the scope of subject matter is unique
and is not to be found in a single volume in the existing literature. It is about a subject that is becoming
very relevant and important in the 21st century. Secondly, the theme is unique and comprises a well-
knitted theme of diverse yet related areas like quality, reliability, maintainability, safety, risk,
environmental impacts, and sustainability. Thirdly, this handbook is about bringing together contributors
of very diverse expertise, interests, and hail from different parts of the world to a common platform in
executing a unifying and meaningful project. This initiative is expected to facilitate intense interaction
between the experts from the diverse areas of performability engineering and break open the watertight
compartments that exist today in an effort to present a holistic approach to performace assessment and
design. It is also heartening to see that some of the contributors are founders of the areas that they
represent. Therefore, the editor considers it a rewarding experience and a very encouraging step towards
the realization of the objective for which this handbook is intended.
There are hundreds of books available on the subject of dependability and constituent areas such as
quality, reliability, maintainability, safety, etc., related to the performance of a product, system or a
service. Dependability is primarily considered an aggregate of one or more of the attributes of
survivability, like quality, reliability, maintainability, etc., and safety. However, these attributes are
interrelated and reflect the level or grade of the product so designed and utilized, which is expressed
through dependability. Nevertheless these attributes are very much influenced by the raw material,
fabrication, technology, techniques, and manufacturing processes and their control, and also by the nature
and the manner of usage. Currently, dependability and cost effectiveness are primarily seen as instruments
for conducting international trade in the free market regime, thereby deciding the economic prosperity of a
nation. This makes one realize that optimal design of a product, system, or service is one where one
optimizes dependability with respect to costs incurred and sometimes with respect to other techno-
economic constraints. This can at best be called partial optimization of the design of a product, system, or
service. The material and energy requirements, waste generated, processes employed, and disposability
are rarely considered for arriving at an optimal design or configuration of a product or a system.
With world resources declining, the cost of raw materials is likely to escalate spirally in the near future
as mining becomes more and more costly and energy intensive due to grades of ore becoming poorer than
before. To keep pace with the rising population, the increased volume of production is bound to affect the
world environmental health further unless pollution prevention measures are vigorously pursued. At every
stage of the life-cycle of a product, be it extraction of material, manufacturing, use, or disposal, energy
and materials are required as inputs, and emissions (gaseous, solid effluents, or residues) are always
associated with this, which influences the environmental health of our habitat. Therefore, the importance
xii Preface
of minimization of material and energy requirements along with the importance of control of effluents and
waste management can hardly be emphasized enough while designing products and systems with
acceptable levels of performance. Unless we consider all these factors together, we cannot call the design
of products, systems, and services truly optimal from the engineering point of view.
Certainly, these factors cannot be considered in isolation of each other. Therefore, emphasis has to be
placed on a holistic view of the entire life cycle of activities of a product or system along with the
associated cost of environmental preservation at each stage while maximizing the product performance. It
must be emphasized here that to preserve our environment for our future generations, the internalization of
the hidden costs of environment preservation will have to be accounted for, sooner or later, in order to be
able to produce sustainable products in the long run. Open access resources can no longer be treated as
freely available, unless we account for their restoration costs as well. In short, we can no longer rely solely
on the criteria of dependability for optimizing the performance of a product, system, or service. We need
to introduce and define a new performance criterion that will take a holistic view of the performance
enhancement along with the associated environmental aspects.
Fortunately, we have the concept of sustainability that provides us with the framework to consider
subjects like dematerialization, energy auditing, waste minimization, reuse and recycling, and other
environmental considerations that can be of immense use in exploring means of clean production. The
concepts of industrial ecology can be of great help in reducing the overall impact on the environment and
to sustain development. Therefore, we have to explore ways of including dependability and sustainability
in our criteria for the design of all future products, systems, and services, and to start with we need a term
to represent all these activities.
In 1980, John Meyer introduced the term performability in the context of the performance evaluation
of aircraft control computers for use by NASA. At the time this term was mainly used to reflect a
composite attribute implying reliability and other associated attributes like availability, maintainability,
etc., although dependability had been used at times to include a greater number of the attributes related to
performance. Therefore, it was considered appropriate and logical to extend the meaning of this term to
include attributes such as dependability and sustainability, rather than inventing a new term.
Performability now would not only mean to include reliability, maintainability, or availability as was
originally proposed, but also to include the whole gamut of attributes, like quality, reliability,
maintainability, safety, and sustainability.
This handbook has been conceived to stimulate further thinking in this direction and to spur research
and developmental effort in making sustainable products, systems, and services, which is the foremost
need of the 21st century if humans are to survive and future generations are to have the same or better
quality of life to prosper on this planet. The objective of this handbook is to introduce engineers,
designers, producers, users, and researchers to visualize the interrelationships of all the performance
attributes, to bring a synergetic interaction between various players of constituent areas of performability,
and to exhort them to launch their activities in the direction of furthering performability engineering.
Today, there is hardly any book available on the market that deals with this subject in its entirety and
provides a holistic perspective of the problem. Neither do the existing books on the subject of survivability
and safety or dependability ever deliberate the issues related to sustainability. Nor do the books on the
subject of sustainability and related areas touch upon problems of survivability and safety or
dependability. For instance, while designing for survivability or dependability, internalization of
environmental costs is not even mentioned, let alone considered. A truly optimal product design must
balance out all the conflicting conditions imposed upon product development by the manufacturing
processes. Obviously, the basic platform for addressing the inherently complex problems of this nature
should emerge from the perspectives of performance, environment, and economics, as these products have
to be produced in a competitive world market.
Preface xiii
This handbook is primarily aimed at facilitating interactions and linkages between these diverse areas and
helps promote the objective of designing, producing, operating, and using sustainable and dependable
products, systems, and services.
Also with this handbook, a person intending to have introduction to performability engineering will
not have to search extensively for relevant information to start his work. It is hoped that this handbook
will offer a reader the necessary background in the subject just at one place. This is, therefore, the first
book of its kind. It is also true that if we have to take to performability engineering as a profession, we
need to create manpower in this discipline and introduce this subject for serious studies in the present day
engineering curriculum. This handbook offers that opportunity to start with.
The handbook is organized in ten distinct sections as follows:
1. System design (7 chapters)
2. Engineering management (3 chapters)
3. Quality engineering and management (7 chapters)
4. Reliability engineering (18 chapters)
5. Reliability and risk methodology (4 chapters)
6. Risk management and safety (5 chapters)
7. Maintenance engineering and maintainability (5 chapters)
8. Sustainability and future technologies (9 chapters)
9. Performability applications (12 chapters)
10. Software engineering and applications (4 chapters)
11. Epilogue
The subject matter contained in the chapters has been selected to provide a balanced coverage of the
entire spectrum of performability engineering. The chapters have been designed to provide up-to-date
information on the subject being discussed. It is expected that this coverage will help achieve the objective
for which this handbook is intended.
In spite of best efforts to make a cohesive presentation, there are bound to be lapses here and there in
such a voluminous work; the editor takes the blame for all these shortcomings. However, if the handbook
is able to create interest among the readers in performability engineering, it should be a matter of great
achievement and pleasure to the editor. Eventually, it would prove to be a good idea that all engineers,
irrespective of their areas of activity or discipline, are exposed to the subject of performability engineering
to offer them with a wider vision of the requirement of sustainable and dependable products, systems, and
services in the 21st century.
Krishna B. Misra
