fiabilipy − about

Why ?

You may ask why are we developing such a software. The answer is actually quite simple. We have been taught reliability engineering during our fourth year study. We used a software that we found quite hard to use, quite non-ergonomic and it was a real black box. What a disappointment.

As students, we wanted to know how the black box actually worked, we wanted a software which enables us to learn how it works and which enables us to build systems as fast and as flexible as possible.

After some investigations, no such software existed. So fiabilipy was born.

How ?

We chose to develop fiabilipy in python for different reasons. One of the firsts is that we strongly believe that python is an elegant and very powerful programming language (and this is may be the one we know the better). We also chose python because there exist a lot of libraries to do what you want really quickly1. Moreover, python can be used for various things (web, scripting, scientist software, games, what ever you want), so it means it enables the final user to use fiabilipy for the purpose she wants and how she wants !

fiabilipy is based on very famous python libraries, such as scipy, numpy, and sympy. We try to use the best of those libraries to make our software as reliable, good and fast as possible.

fiabilipy was started as a personal project to do some lab work about reliability engineering. Today, fiabilipy is one of our university work and is supervised by two teachers of ours, Walter Schön and Mohamed Sallak.

Target audience

This software does not aim to be another complicated reliability engineering software. The more complex a software is, the more errors there are. That why, among others reasons, it has to be kept simple2. So industries are not our target audience at all.

So, who else might be interested by such a software ? Our answer is the universities, the students, the teachers. We aim to reach these people. We try to write as much as documentation as possible so curious students and teachers can start using fiabilipy easily. It is, and will remain, a free software3. It means people are allowed and encourage to read the code source, to learn how it works, to do experiments, or what they want. The fact that the software is free is really important according to us:

What can you do ?

The first thing you can do, is to use the software.

If you are a teacher and you find this software interesting or promising, please, spread the word to your students and colleagues.

If you are a student and you find this software interesting and you want to use it in your own university, spread the word to you teachers, to your friends ! If you want, you can !

Well, any way, spread the word !

Do not hesitate to contact us for any question or remark.

If you wish to join our small development team, be free to contact us, we do not bite ;)


1 For instance, fiabilipy was developed only to handle float values. Adding the sympy library enables our software to handle symbolic values ! It took us a very few time to adapt the code.

2 KISS: Keep It Simple, Stupid

3 free as in as speech, not as in a beer. It means that the user is free. The software respects the user and she has the minimal four freedoms: the software may be used, copied, studied, modified and redistributed. For more information, see here.