Foreword.(reliability engineering)

The Editors of the IIE Transactions and its editorial board oftentimes initiate Special Issues on emerging research areas, or topics in a well-established area. In other cases, the Special Issue is dedicated to honor a founder and a leading researcher who has had a sustained influence on the industrial engineering discipline. This Special Issue is in the latter category.

The first IIE Transactions issue honoring such a leader was dedicated to A. Alan B. Pritsker, one of the founders of the field of simulation. This is the second such Special Issue and is dedicated to honor Richard E., Barlow, one of the leaders of modern reliability theory for the past four decades.

Without a doubt, most of the key researchers in the field of reliability engineering or statistical reliability today had their first exposure to the field through Barlow and Proschan's books (Barlow and Proschan, 1965, 1975). These two books have influenced the entire field for many years. They are seminal books and their impacts are evidenced as they are among the most cited texts in reliability engineering. Foremost among Barlow's achievements is his work on the theory and methodology of modeling the failure rate of systems and components. In the early 1960s his work led to the first papers on Increasing Failure Rate (IFR) distributions (Barlow et al., 1963; Barlow and Marshall, 1964) and inequalities for IFRA (Increasing Failure Rate Average) and IFR distributions. This later culminated in his book with Proschan in 1965. He later worked on the isotonic regression problem, not directly related to the reliability field, and this work also culminated yet in another classical book (Barlow et al., 1972).

In the late 1960s and early-1970s there was tremendous interest in nuclear energy and safety issues with nuclear plants. Extensive work had been done on fault tree analysis to demonstrate the safety of such plants. Barlow et al. (1975) edited a major reference on reliability and fault tree analysis which brought the two subjects closer than ever. Some of Barlow's work was closely related to engineering applications, such as his work on accelerated degradation models where he modeled the degradation of Kevlar and similar materials. His research in reliability engineering through the advising of Ph.D. students demonstrated an in-depth understanding of the fundamentals of engineering materials and their mechanical properties as illustrated in relating Hook's law (modulus of elasticity of a material is the ratio of stress and strain in the elastic region) to Weibull's model and other distributions to von Mises' criterion. (The von Mises criterion states that failure occurs when the energy of distortion reaches the same energy for yield/failure in uniaxial tension.) His work in reliability engineering culminated in his book Engineering Reliability (Barlow, 1998). This work is also attributed to the step change in Barlow's view of probability that occurred in the late-1970s when he became heavily involved in Bayesian statistics. Since then his emphasis and approaches shifted gradually to the Bayesian approach for the analysis and modeling of engineering problems as demonstrated in many of his papers.

Among Barlow's lasting contributions to the field of statistical reliability and reliability engineering is the reliability importance measure of the components in a system, which is referred to as Barlow and Proschan's Importance Measure. It is widely used in practice and is always used for comparison with new or alternative measures.

Barlow's groundbreaking contributions are widely available via his well-known texts and journal papers. We are indeed fortunate to have benefited from Richard E. Barlow's contributions to the industrial engineering community at large and to the reliability engineering field in particular.

This Special Issue is one way to honor him and acknowledge his contributions.

This Special Issue would not have materialized without the enthusiastic support from Susan Albin, Editor of the IIE Transactions on Quality and Reliability Engineering and Candi Yano, Editor-in-Chief of the IIE Transactions. I gratefully acknowledge the contributions of the authors and the extensive efforts of a large, anonymous group of dedicated referees who worked voluntarily and silently behind the scenes.

E. A. Elsayed

Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering,

Rutgers University,

Piscataway, NJ 08854-0818, USA.

E-mail: elsayed@rci.rutgers.edu

References

Barlow, R.E. (1998) Engineering Reliability, SIAM, Philadelphia, PA.

Barlow, R.E., Bartholomew, D.J., Bremner, J.M. and Brunk, H.D. (1972) Statistical Inference under Order Restrictions; The Theory and Application of Isotonic Regression, Wiley, New York, NY.

Barlow, R.E., Fussell, J.B. and Singpurwalla, N.D. (1975) Reliability and Fault Tree Analysis, SIAM, Philadelphia, PA.

Barlow, R.E. and Marshall, A.W. (1964) Bounds for distributions with monotone hazard rate I and II. Annals of Mathematical Statistics, 35, 1234-1274.

Barlow, R.E., Marshall, A.W., and Proschan, F. (1963) Properties of probability distributions with monotone hazard rate. Annals of Mathematical Statistics, 34, 375-389.

Barlow, R.E. and Proschan, F. (1965) Mathematical Theory of Reliability, Wiley, New York, NY.

Barlow, R.E. and Proschan, F. (1975) Statistical Theory of Reliability, Holt, Rinehart & Winston, New York, NY.

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