A New Perspective on Defining Quality and Reliability

摘要

There has been a great deal of interest in quality and reliability in recent years. In general the usage of the two terms is confusing and in specific, researchers have defined these 'system' measures for use within their disciplines and many of these definitions are incompatible when applied to other areas. The purpose of this paper is to define quality and reliability for use in all disciplines - especially when redundancy is inherent. By using a discipline-independent method to define these measures, a working definition of quality and reliability can be found and their discussion much easier made possible. Linear graph modeling is a convenient way to represent topology and its terminology helps to establish definitions and relationships.