Toshio Nakagawa is Professor of Engineering at Aichi Institute of Technology. He is considered the world leader in maintenance reliability engineering and has worked in this area for thirty years. He has published more than a hundred research papers mainly on the subject of maintenance and reliability theory. Professor Nakagawa was an invited contributor of one of the key chapters of Springera (TM)s recent Handbook of Reliability Engineering (1-85233-453-3, 2003) and is the author of Maintenance Theory of Reliability (Springer, 1-85233-939-X, August 2005).