Publisher's Synopsis
Probabilistic design is a discipline within engineering design. It deals primarily with the consideration of the effects of random variability upon the performance of an engineering system during the design phase. Typically, these effects are related to quality and reliability. Thus, probabilistic design is a tool that is mostly used in areas that are concerned with quality and reliability. For example, product design, quality control, systems engineering, machine design, civil engineering (particularly useful in limit state design) and manufacturing. It differs from the classical approach to design by assuming a small probability of failure instead of using the safety factor. Methods engineering is a subspecialty of industrial engineering and manufacturing engineering concerned with human integration in industrial production processes. Alternatively it can be described as the design of the productive process in which a person is involved. The task of the Methods engineer is to decide where humans will be utilized in the process of converting raw materials to finished products and how workers can most effectively perform their assigned tasks. The terms operation analysis, work design and simplification, and methods engineering and corporate re-engineering are frequently used interchangeably. Measurements are usually subject to variation and measurement uncertainty; thus they are repeated and full experiments are replicated to help identify the sources of variation, to better estimate the true effects of treatments to further strengthen the experiment's reliability and validity, and to add to the existing knowledge of the topic. However, certain conditions must be met before the replication of the experiment is commenced: the original research question has been published in a peer-reviewed journal or widely cited, the researcher is independent of the original experiment, the researcher must first try to replicate the original findings using the original data, and the write-up should state that the study conducted is a replication study that tried to follow the original study as strictly as possible. This handbook has been written in easy and fluent language expressive and self-explanatory labelled diagrams, concise but not too brief, written to the point starting from fundamentals and finishing to the most advanced and current concepts. All diagrams have been provided with detailed legends. Some diagrams have been drawn the author himself from the original source, while the remaining ones are quoted from the authentic works.
