Mean time to unsafe failure

Abstract

With the increased use of electronics and networks comes a concern about their failure modes. If they fail, we wish they did so in a benign manner. Hence, a reliability parameter of interest is the expected time to a disastrous failure, where there is a loss of money, information, or time. The models and methods for computing this expectation, however, are still in an early stage. This paper presents new material that permits examining more complex and realistic models.