The paper considers issues related to well-balanced management of resources for JSC RZD infrastructure maintenance under the conditions of scarce finances. The authors have made an analysis of the RAMS methodology and its further transformation into a complex of Russian standards and normative and methodology documentation base applied for management of life cycle processes of railway transport systems (URRAN) in JSC RZD. The paper studies the prerequisites and key aspects for development of the innovative technology of management decision making support for increase of dependability and functional safety of transport in Russia at all life-cycle stages.

The article proposes a new method of solving logical equations with one or more unknown variables and systems of logical equations that use a modified truth table. This method allows finding all general solutions. Solvability conditions of equation systems have been found. The theory has been illustrated by examples. Technical applications have been shown.

The paper considers research of various nonparametric methods of checking a hypothesis of randomness of sampled data in a situation when these data contain repeating (tied) observations. The repeating observations named ties lead to ambiguous ranking. The arithmetic-mean rank is usually assigned to elements of the tied group. As a result, statistical decision rules change as the criterion statistics changes its distribution. This paper is devoted to research of capacity of various criteria at presence of ties.

In 2013 it was 90 years since the first steps were made toward organizing the repair of industrial hardware on a schedule basis, and 80 years since developing and testing the system of scheduled preventive repairs (SPR) based on periodical repairs at plants. The goal of the paper is to remind of the first steps and milestones of development of SPR system. The author believes that some lessons from those bygone days are still valid today.

The paper puts forth the main findings of dependability analysis of gas compression units (GCU) operated by Russian gas transmission companies. The authors examine the key design and functionality features of GCUs, as well as the matters of dependability in the gas industry. The paper presents the structural and functional GCU dependability model (SFDM) that was developed based on the results of GCU dependability research.

The paper considers the method of complete decomposition of bridge (cross) connections of structurally complex bipolar networks whose content is the generalization algorithm of the well-known Moore-Shannon’s decomposition formula for analysis of connectivity of a ladder bridge bipolar network. The offered method allows for considerably reducing a number of analyzed states as compared to known combinatory methods, e.g. an exhaustion method of elements’ states [2].

Elementwise evaluation of dependability measures is carried out during designing information – measuring systems. Climatic conditions essentially affect operability of resistors. The paper offers evaluation methodology of resistors’ dependability measures, which is used at change of their operation conditions. Based on results of short-term reliability tests in the specified conditions, dependability measures of resistors are calculated by prediction of electric parameters values of resistors during their life.

The paper presents the bases of human – operator (pilot) dependability theory. The major property of human activity is called a category of assignment. The assignments can be estimated in structured generic segmentation of dependability concept. This study also shows that the time scale is the universal basis for segmentation of human dependability concept.

The main auditory of the journal is engineers and researchers concerned about development of highly reliable equipment and its failure-free operation. We can possibly assume that due to the character of their professional activities they may not know the theory of reliability sufficiently to comprehend all mathematical aspects of papers, however they are good at practical issues of application of paper results.