Dimitris N. Chorafas: Statistical Process and Reliability Engineering

The need for reliable complex systems in industry and the military has set the stage for a great expansion in the field of reliability control. With this expansion comes the need for a much better understanding by engineers and project managers of the mathematics underlying their work.
Many good books are available on mathematics written for the mathematician. The gap that this book is intended to fill is the relation of various mathematical concepts to one another and to the field of reliability engineering. This is a book on the mathematics of reliability written for the project manager and the engineer.
No task is perhaps so thankless, or invites so much abuse from all quarters, as that of the mediator between hostile points of view. Nor is the traditional distrust of the peacemaker in the intellectual realm diffcult to appreciate, since he so often must substitute a viewpoint which has a practical clarity but which is imperfect from all extreme viewpoints. And yet, no task is so essential, especially when the role of the mediator is related to as important and serious a subject as the reliability of modern complex systems.
The mathematician on one hand and the engineer on the other live in different mental worlds. The acme of perfection to the mathematician is absolute rigor and purity in his operations. The engineer, on the other hand, specializes in compromise. The most perfectly engineered device is an optimum of compromised facts and conditions.
The most powerful mathematical tools are sometimes less important to the engineer than some of the simpler or less powerful tools. But often, for lack of information about either, neither is used. The most effective mathematical approach must be selected for each modern engineering problem as the basis for valid scientific decision. But the optimum use of mathematics requires thorough preplanning based on knowledge of the capabilities of the mathematical tools.