Semester

Fall

Date of Graduation

1999

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Type

MS

College

Statler College of Engineering and Mineral Resources

Department

Industrial and Managements Systems Engineering

Committee Chair

R. Ahluwalia.

Abstract

Reliability analysis is now an essential part of any product development. In the field of Electrical Engineering, reliability models are developed and analyzed for every component before it comes to market. The complexity of the product can range from a simple transistor to an integrated circuit chip, from a simple communication link to a complex network, and from a small generator to a large powerhouse.;Over the period, several techniques have been developed to systematically model real systems and then analyze them. These techniques are constantly being enhanced to improve the modeling process and to reduce the time required for the analysis of that model. A well-modeled system may be too complex to be analyzed within a reasonable amount of time. On the other hand, an oversimplified model may not be able to depict the characteristics of a real system. A global solution to these problems is to reach a compromise between the model complexity and model execution and analysis time.;The objectives of this research were to study several hardware-software reliability models, and existing algorithms to compute system reliability and to select an approach that can be efficiently implemented on personal computer. A comprehensive software tool that uses both hardware and software reliability models and computes exact reliability of a system was developed using Visual Basic.

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