Special Section on Reliability Modeling and Assessment of Complex Engineering Systems with Mixed Uncertainty

Abstract

Engineering systems are becoming increasingly complex. They need to meet advanced requirements, especially in mission-critical fields with a low failure tolerance. As unexpected failures during the designed lifespan of a system may lead to catastrophic consequences, their reliability modeling and assessment are of utmost importance. The reliability modeling should achieve the safety requirement at a reasonable confidence level to help decision-makers arrive at sound decisions in practice.However, the modeling and assessment of real engineering systems often must be made in an environment with mixed uncertainty, due to either the inherent randomness (aleatory uncertainty) or a lack of knowledge (epistemic uncertainty). Particularly, available information for reliability modeling is often imperfect, arising from insufficient accumulated knowledge, biased prior information, limited field test data, etc. This makes reliability assessment considering imperfect information and mixed uncertainty an imperative yet challenging task.