3. Safety vs. availability (production)

From the very beginning, around fifty years ago, the field of reliability has focused on the safety of industrial installations, and this situation has persisted to the present day. The economic aspect, linked to the profitability of operations - an equally important and indispensable direct counterpart to operational safety - has been much less developed than the previous one.

For a long time, for this second aspect, reliability engineers were content with simple, classic availability assessments. When, around ten years ago, the demand for production availability studies began to grow, engineers outside the world of reliability managed to satisfy it by developing specialized tools to meet their specific needs (and which we won't go into in the context of this article, given their lack of generality). Aided in this by international standards which separate safety...