During the 2022 ESREL conference in Dublin, the ESRA General Assembly voted for three new officers of the ESRA board:

• Chairman: Michael Beer, Leibniz Universität Hannover, Germany
• Vice Chairman: Edoardo Patelli, University of Strathclyde, UK
• Treasurer: Maria Chiara Leva, Technological University Dublin, Ireland.

Along with the General Secretary Myrto Konstantinidou (National Center for Scientific Research Demokritos, Greece), they constitute the current new board of ESRA. Please have a look at their letter of intention.

ESRA is supporting the 2nd International Workshop on Reliability Engineering and Computational Intelligence 2022, to be held at Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands on November 14 - 15, 2022. 

Excellent papers for the 1st RECI workshop in the year 2020 demonstrated strong synergy between Reliability Engineering and Computational Intelligence but scientific differences remain. The 2nd RECI workshop attempts to address further integration by:

a) presenting papers on RECI topics,

b) panel discussions about future RECI research and

c) a curriculum discussion for an international RECI curriculum.

The workshop is organized by University of Zilina, TNO, Delft University of Technology, and the University of Huddersfield. For more information, please see the workshop flyer and website.

The ESRA Technical Committee “Decision Making under Uncertainty” aims at bringing together specialists from industry and researchers worldwide who are contributing to improving the process of decision making under uncertainty with a focus on – but not limited to – reliability, safety and security.

To get the activities of the Technical Committee started, we are organizing a Kick-off event at this year’s ICSRS conference in Venice (Nov. 23-25 http://icsrs.org). Please see the special session page for more information.

Dealing with uncertainties in decision making is a challenge vividly illustrated by latest developments. Measures against the global corona pandemic had a lasting negative effect on entire economic sectors. The European energy supply is currently being put to the test not only by the sudden shortage of gas and oil but also by very different concepts and perspectives in individual member states, leading to inconsistently developed plans to contain the energy crisis and slow down global warming. Balancing risks in presence of deep uncertainty is one of the core issues to be addressed by industry experts and researchers from around the world, who are interested to join and contribute to our future activities.

If you would like to share and broaden your knowledge in this field or present and discuss your issues in a special session at the ICSRS conference in Venice (Nov. 23-25 http://icsrs.org), pls. answer a short survey with more information no later than Oct. 2nd, at   https://uni-w.de/tc-dmu2. Make sure you leave your contact details, so we can get back to you and add you to the expert network. To participate in the Kick-off event in Venice, you may also directly submit a one-page abstract to wolf@iss.uni-wuppertal.de.

Do not hesitate to contact us with further questions!  

Kai-Dietrich Wolf: wolf@iss.uni-wuppertal.de       Enrico Zio: enrico.zio@polimi.it

The latest “ESRA webinar” was given by Prof. Mitra Foularidad, of Ecole Centrale de Marseille on a foundational topic concerning models predictions and uncertainties, on April 6th, 12.00-13.00 CET  (Click here for the slides).  

 Prediction: thorough uncertain models rather than imperfect exact models 

 In presence of data (measurements, observations, simulations), the prediction of a physical phenomenon evolution can be carried out by using statistical models. These models can take into account the underlying physical model or completely neglect this latter but offer a relatively precise prediction with confidence bounds.  These models permit to take into account the uncertainties and randomness related to the parameters, environmental, experimental or usage conditions. The prediction will be proposed with confidence bounds and sensitivity analysis can be carried out. The parameters of these models can be updated based on available new data and an on-line adaptative prediction can be proposed. Statistical models, less expensive in computation time, permit the prediction in cases where deterministic models are not able to give results due to the computation time or due to the complexity of the model in presence of unknown factors and parameters. The relevance of statistical models is essentially linked to the quality and size of available data. We go through some case studies to highlight the interest of these models.

About the speaker: Mitra Fouladirad is Full professor in mathematical modelling for Reliability, Prognosis and Maintenance. After 15 years in University Technology of Troyes focusing in PHM and Maintenance modelling in collaboration with industry she joined in 2021 the Ecole Centrale Marseille in France. Her main focus is in condition-based and predictive maintenance modelling tasking into account  different source of uncertainty. She is one the maintenance technical chairs of ESRA and she participates actively to ESREL since 2007. 

 

ESRA is happy to announce our key annual event for knowledge exchange: the European Safety and Reliability Conference (ESREL 2022) in Dublin, Ireland from 28th August - 1st September 2022. Please visit the ESREL 2022 webpage to stay updated and join the event.

Over 600 abstracts have been submitted, with more than 30 special sessions being organized. A great program is shaping up! 

43rd International Summer School of Automatic Control - Grenoble, France - September, 5-9, 2022

Reliability And Maintenance Of Dynamic Systems: Advanced Methods And Recent Developments

The objective of this one-week summer school is to introduce the participants to the different approaches recently developed in the field of dependability of dynamic systems, in response to recent evolutions both in the addressed systems and in the used disciplines and tools. Approaches to dependability have been indeed confronted with a paradigm shift, due to increasingly complex, monitored and controlled systems and to the emergence of the use of new disciplines (e.g. artificial intelligence) in reliability and maintenance. This paradigm shift has profoundly modified the vision of systems reliability and dependability, leading to the emergence of new approaches: PHM (Prognostic and Health Management), Predictive Maintenance, RxM (Prescriptive Maintenance), Reliability-Aware Control or Degradation-Aware Control, Post-Prognosis Decision Making, etc. The participants will be trained in the tools and methods on which these approaches are based and the school will consist of a series of surveys, lectures and research talks taught in English, completed by a series of applications sessions on the following themes:

• Reliability, maintenance and safety: old problems, classical methods and new challenges

• Dynamic reliability modelling with application to the resilience of critical infrastructures

• Prognostics and health management: from monitoring to post-prognostics decision-making

• Artificial intelligence approaches to reliability and predictive maintenance

• Reliability and degradation aware control, RUL control and reliability adaptive systems

• Reliability and safety of autonomous systems

• Advances methods for stochastic deterioration and (imperfect) maintenance modelling

• Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) and damage aware active control

The school is mainly intended for PhD students, researchers and industrial participants wishing to initiate, consolidate or reorient their research project in the field of reliability and maintenance of dynamic systems.

For more information : http://www.gipsa-lab.fr/summerschool/AUTO22/

Contact : christophe.berenguer@grenoble-inp.fr

ESRA has a new Technical Committee: 

Decision Making under Uncertainty

Please see the ESRA Board here. 

See past and recent newsletters here. 

- Humans and Risk, Reliability, Resilience Models

   by senior scientist Dr. Luca Podofillini, 29 November 2017

- A tutorial on global sensitivity analysis for risk and reliability modelling

   by Professor Emanuele Borgonovo, 11 May 2017

- Alternative approaches to the treatment of epistemic uncertainties in risk assessment

   by Professor Michael Beer, 2 November 2016

- Challenges and opportunities in reliability engineering: the big KID (Knowledge,

   Information and Data) 

   by Professor Enrico Zio, 14 June 2016

- What is risk?

   by Professor Terje Aven, 17 March 2016