Treatment of Uncertainty in Risk and Reliability Modeling and Decision-Making

The special collection on Treatment of Uncertainty in Risk and Reliability Modeling and Decision-Making is available in the ASCE Library (https://ascelibrary.org/ajrua6/reliability_modeling_decision_making).

Dealing with uncertainty is inherent to risk and reliability analysis. Methods to represent, model, and propagate uncertainties have been developed since the beginning of the field. Decision-making under uncertainty and communication of uncertainties need to be integral parts of any risk and reliability management activity. As engineered systems become more complex, interconnected, and interdependent, capturing uncertainties in the risk and reliability models becomes even more challenging. This is because of the possibly unclear system boundaries, the complexity of the models themselves, the features of the data available (either too little or overwhelming and unstructured), and the large implications of suboptimal decisions.

This special collection includes works that address various issues in the treatment of uncertainties in reliability and risk applications concerning components, systems, structures, and infrastructures, characterized by multiparametric, nonlinear, dependent relationships. The scope of the works presented ranges from data analysis, system design, and assessment to decision-making. The advanced methods used are both mathematical and computational.

The collection builds on (but is not limited to) papers presented at the 25th edition of the European Safety and Reliability (ESREL) Conference, ESREL 2015, of the European Safety and Reliability Association. The conference took place at ETH Zürich, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, September 7–10, 2015.