The ever increasing public demand and the setting-up of national and
international legislation on safety assessment of potentially dangerous
plants require that a correspondingly increased effort be devoted by
regulatory bodies and industrial organisations to collect reliability
data in order to produce safety analyses. Reliability data are also
needed to assess availability of plants and services and to improve
quality of production processes, in particular, to meet the needs of
plant operators and/or designers regarding maintenance planning,
production availability, etc. The need for an educational effort in the
field of data acquisition and processing has been stressed within the
framework of EuReDatA, an association of organisations operating
reliability data banks. This association aims to promote data exchange
and pooling of data between organisations and to encourage the adoption
of compatible standards and basic definitions for a consistent exchange
of reliability data. Such basic definitions are considered to be
essential in order to improve data quality. To cover issues directly
linked to the above areas ample space is devoted to the definition of
failure events, common cause and human error data, feedback of
operational and disturbance data, event data analysis, lifetime
distributions, cumulative distribution functions, density functions,
Bayesian inference methods, multivariate analysis, fuzzy sets and
possibility theory, etc.