Since 1981, Dr. Chandrasekhar Putcha has been a Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at California State University, Fullerton. Before that, he was on the research faculty at West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV and a Post-Doctoral Fellow at University of Sherbrooke in Canada. His research areas of interest are –Reliability, Risk Analysis, Optimization and Mathematical Modeling. Because of his interdisciplinary areas of research, Dr. Putcha has published more than 175 research papers in various disciplines, such as Engineering, Business, Economics, Medicine, Kinesiology, Political Science and Sociology. He has done consulting work for several leading companies and received research grants from companies such as Boeing, Northrop Grumman Corporation (NGC), and from federal agencies, such as – NASA, Navy, Air Force, US Army Corps of Engineers. In 2007, Dr. Putcha received the campus-wide Outstanding Professor Award at California State University, Fullerton. He is the first recipient of this award from College of Engineering in 44 years, since this award was instituted in 1963. Also, Dr. Putcha is a Fellow of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) and he was the Head of Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at California State University, Fullerton (CSUF) from 1996-2002.
This year’s spring school is a week-long short course and practicum on Reliability Analysis. It will feature a series of lectures presented by Professor Chandrasekhar Putcha (California State University Fullerton) and Mohamed Sallak (Université de Technologie de Compiègne). There will also be ancillary lectures and workshops by researchers from the Risk Institute. Ample time will be allotted for questions and discussion.
Reliability analysis is a widely used methodology with applications in engineering, medicine, computer science, management and economics. The talks will introduce basic concepts of reliability theory as well as some recent advances, including Monte Carlo analysis, decision theory, different kinds of regression analyses, Bayesian analysis, fault trees, mean time failure, series versus parallel, k-out-of-n, consecutive-k systems, repairable versus nonrepairable systems, coherent versus noncoherent systems, binary and multi-state systems, cutsets, failure models, Birnbaum importance, dependence concepts, time series, burn-in and ageing models, lifecycle analysis, and reliability analysis with very small data sets such as when system failures are extremely rare.
Discussion will address the question of whether quantitative reliability analysis is practically useful. Patrick D.T. O’Connor in his 2002 book Practical Reliability Engineering asserted “Nearly all teaching and literature on [reliability engineering]… ignore the reality that the ranges of uncertainty involved largely invalidate quantitative methods for prediction and measurement.” We will consider how quantitative models should handle uncertainty.
Professor Chandrasekhar Putcha
California State University, Fullerton
Mohammed Sallak
Compiegne University of Technology, France
Mohamed Sallak received the Ph.D. degree from the National Polytechnic Institute of Lorraine, Nancy, France, in 2007. He is currently an Associate Professor / HDR with the Department of Information Processing Engineering, Sorbonne Universities, Compiegne University of Technology, France. His current research interests concern dependability assessment of complex systems under uncertainties using several uncertainty theories (belief function theory, imprecise probabilities).