Interrelating Quality and Reliability in Engineering Systems

摘要

In recent years, quality has been defined as an inherent characteristic or attribute of a product or sys- tem, and reliability has been allotted one of the characteristics. This does not fully aid the design process because it is difficult to place a number on both quality and reliability at the same time. Here in, we assign quality a probabilistic metric and define it in terms of either conformance or fitness for use. At the same time, we emphasize the topological issues in reliability. By invoking a common probabilistic metric, we provide a structure to both relate and calculate quality and reliability for all disciplines-especially when redundancy is inherent.