Fast technological development produces systems of ever-increasing complex- ity. The demand for reliable functioning of these systems has become more and more important. Thus, there is a need for highly reliable technical devices and systems, for monitoring and controlling their functioning and for planning maintenance and corrective actions to fulfill given requirements considering eco- nomic limitations. These tasks reflect the wide field of engineering activities that are accompa- nied by and based on a wide range of stochastical models. The book presents the main contributions to a...

Shanti S. Gupta has made pioneering contributions to ranking and selection theory; in particular, to subset selection theory. His list of publications and the numerous citations his publications have received over the last forty years will amply testify to this fact. Besides ranking and selection, his interests include order statistics and reliability theory. The first editor's association with Shanti Gupta goes back to 1965 when he came to Purdue to do his Ph.D. He has the good fortune of being a student, a colleague and a long-standing collaborator of Shanti Gupta. The second editor's...

Sri Gopal Mohanty has made pioneering contributions to lattice path counting and its applications to probability and statistics. This is clearly evident from his lifetime publications list and the numerous citations his publications have received over the past three decades. My association with him began in 1982 when I came to McMaster Univer- sity. Since then, I have been associated with him on many different issues at professional as well as cultural levels; I have benefited greatly from him on both these grounds. I have enjoyed very much being his colleague in the statistics group here at...

This volume consists of twenty-four papers selected by the editors from the sixty-one papers presented at the 1st International Conference on Mathemati- cal Methods in Reliability held at the Politehnica University of Bucharest from 16 to 19 September 1997. The papers have been divided into three sections: statistical methods, probabilistic methods, and special techniques and appli- cations. Of course, as with any classification, some papers could be as well assigned to other sections. Problems in reliability are encountered in items in everyday usage. Relia- bility is an important feature of...

The present book is based on a course developed as partofthe large NSF-funded GatewayCoalitionInitiativeinEngineeringEducationwhichincludedCaseWest ern Reserve University, Columbia University, Cooper Union, Drexel University, Florida International University, New Jersey Institute ofTechnology, Ohio State University, University ofPennsylvania, Polytechnic University, and Universityof South Carolina. The Coalition aimed to restructure the engineering curriculum by incorporating the latest technological innovations and tried to attract more and betterstudents to engineering and science....

Parametric and semiparametric models are tools with a wide range of applications to reliability, survival analysis, and quality of life. This self-contained volume examines these tools in survey articles written by experts currently working on the development and evaluation of models and methods. While a number of chapters deal with general theory, several explore more specific connections and recent results in "real-world" reliability theory, survival analysis and related fields.

Specific topics covered include:

* non-parametric estimation of lifetimes of...

Traditions of the 150-year-old St. Petersburg School of Probability and Statis- tics had been developed by many prominent scientists including P. L. Cheby- chev, A. M. Lyapunov, A. A. Markov, S. N. Bernstein, and Yu. V. Linnik. In 1948, the Chair of Probability and Statistics was established at the Department of Mathematics and Mechanics of the St. Petersburg State University with Yu. V. Linik being its founder and also the first Chair. Nowadays, alumni of this Chair are spread around Russia, Lithuania, France, Germany, Sweden, China, the United States, and Canada. The fiftieth anniversary of...

This is a volume consisting of selected papers that were presented at the 3rd St. Petersburg Workshop on Simulation held at St. Petersburg, Russia, during June 28-July 3, 1998. The Workshop is a regular international event devoted to mathematical problems of simulation and applied statistics organized by the Department of Stochastic Simulation at St. Petersburg State University in cooperation with INFORMS College on Simulation (USA). Its main purpose is to exchange ideas between researchers from Russia and from the West as well as from other coun- tries throughout the World. The 1st Workshop...

Censored sampling arises in a life-testing experiment whenever the experimenter does not observe (either intentionally or unintentionally) the failure times of all units placed on a life-test. Inference based on censored sampling has been studied during the past 50 years by numerous authors for a wide range of lifetime distributions such as normal, exponential, gamma, Rayleigh, Weibull, extreme value, log-normal, inverse Gaussian, logistic, Laplace, and Pareto. Naturally, there are many different forms of censoring that have been discussed in the literature. In this book, we consider a...

Conceiving reliablesystems is a strategic issue for any industrial society. Hence, reliability has become a discipline at the beginning of the Second World War. In fact, reliability is a field of reseach common to mathematics, operational research, informatics, graph theory, physics, and so forth. We are concerned here with the mathematical side of reliability, of which probability, statistics, and more specially stochastic processes theory constitute the natural basis. US army during the war, and later in the US Problems encountered by the and Soviet space programs, have led to an...