A perspective to some issues on reliability concept, model and method

Reliability concepts, models and methods have been developed in different fields and applied to a variety of engineering cases from component, system to process. Besides the great amount of successive applications, challenges are everywhere including the understanding to the role of random load environment, especially its uncertainty in reliability estimation and experiment, the mechanism to produce the bathtub type failure rate curve, the modeling of component/system reliability under complex load environment and with multiple failure modes, and so on. Focused in the present paper are general load-strength interaction analysis method and related failure rate modeling approach, statistical dependence among component failures, characterization and expression of the statistical property of random load environment, and the incorporation of the factors describing time, space and failure mechanism to develop comprehensive reliability models capable of reflecting stochastic load environment and material degradation behavior.