Reliability Engineering is an interdisciplinary, interdepartmental program housed in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. The academic and research program of the Reliability Engineering Program are based upon the recognition that the performance of a complex system is affected by engineering inputs that begin at conception and extend throughout its lifetime. Students may specialize in Assessment (Root-Cause Failure Analysis, Probabilistic Risk Assessment, Common-Cause Failures); Testing and Operation (Operator Manufacturing Methods); Component and Structures Reliability (Microelectronics and Materials); Electronic Packaging Reliability; Software Reliability.

Reliability, Safety and Quality are the key words to success in today's commercial, industrial and public sector environments. Reliability Engineering perform a wide variety of special management and engineering tasks to ensure that system reliability and quality goals are achieved. These tasks include designing for reliability and maintainability, developing appropriate quality control procedures, and incorporating failure data and failure analysis in program management.

The Reliability Engineering Program is guided by industrial concerns and requirements. The Faculty closely interact with over thirty companies nationally and with State of Maryland industries through the Engineering Research Center. Special courses and lectures are transmitted directly to industry by the University's Instructional Television System. The program has achieved national and international recognition through IEEE Reliability Society and ASQC Reliability Division awards.

The Reliability Engineering Program at the University of Maryland

The Reliability Engineering Program at the University of Maryland was approved to offer the MS and PhD degrees in Reliability Engineering in 1989. It provides a broad range of courses and experiences for its students, designed to prepare them to assist the nation in its ability to produce complex technological systems with ultra-high reliability and availability.

Engineers typically have been trained to design devices to meet certain performance requirements without consideration of reliability, maintainability and supportability. This fact has, in part contributed to the loss of technological leadership and market share for many industries in today's competitive market.

Our graduate program is designed to take qualified engineers and provide them with the tools they will need to better understand the factors that cause components and systems to fail. These tools include stress analysis methods to calculate loads, probabilistic methods to assess time to failure distributions, laboratory tools to conduct postmortems and identify failures causes, and computer models to identify system failure modes and effects.

What is Reliability Engineering?

Reliability engineers perform a wide variety of special management and engineering tasks to ensure that sufficient attention is given to details that will affect the reliability of a given system. The tasks for production of a particular system include the following specific reliability tasks:

• Participate in the planning stages to ensure that resources for a good reliability engineering program are being allocated.
• Prepare a reliability program plan, that is, list the needed reliability tasks and for each give the depth to which it should be performed, when it should be performed, who will use the results, and the resources (time, people, money) that the task will use.
• Budget the allowable system failures down to the component level. July 9, 2007ailures and their effects.
• Evaluate the reliability potential of alternative designs.
• Ensure that all components in a design will actually behave as the designer anticipates they will behave, and that they will have suitably long lives.
• Formulate and run tests on components, subsystems, and the system itself.
• Provide information to designers on how to improve both the life of a system and its ease of maintenance
• Investigate user complaints and field failures. Set up programs to ensure that information about field failures is timely, accurate, well organized, and used by those who can do something with it.