These three volumes comprise the papers presented at the ESREL '97 International Conference on Safety and Reliability held in Lisbon, Portugal, 17-20 June 1997. The purpose of the annual ESREL conferences is to provide a forum for the presentation of technical and scientific papers covering both methods and applications of safety and reliability to a wide range of industrial sectors and technical disciplines and, in so doing, to enhance cross-fertilization between them.A broad view is taken of safety and reliability which includes probabilistically-based methods, or, more generally, methods that deal with the quantification of the uncertainty in the knowledge of the real world and with decision-making under this uncertainty.The areas covered include: design and product liability; availability, reliability and maintainability; assessment and management of risks to technical systems; health and the environment; and mathematical methods of reliability and statistical analysis of data.The organization of the book closely follows the sessions of the conference with each of the three volumes containing papers from two parallel sessions, comprising a total of 270 papers by authors from 35 countries.

This book, on the ergonomics of human−machine systems, is aimed at engineers specializing in informatics, automation, production or robotics, who are faced with a significant dilemma during the conception of human−machine systems. On the one hand, the human operator guarantees the reliability of the system and has been known to salvage numerous critical situations through an ability to reason in unplanned, imprecise and uncertain situations; on the other hand, the human operator can be unpredictable and create disturbances in the automated system. The first part of the book is dedicated to the methods of human-centered design, from three different points of view, the various chapters focusing on models developed by human engineers and functional models to explain human behavior in their environment, models of cognitive psychology and models in the domain of automobile driving. Part 2 develops the methods of evaluation of the human−machine systems, looking at the evaluation of the activity of the human operator at work and human error analysis methods. Finally, Part 3 is dedicated to human−machine cooperation, where the authors show that a cooperative agent comprises a know-how and a so-called know-how-to-cooperate and show the way to design and evaluate that cooperation in real industrial contexts.

This book is a collection of papers presented at the International Conference on Reliability Techniques and their Application.Reliability 91, 10-12 June 1991 was held at the Royal Lancaster Hotel, London, UK, organised by SRD (the Safety and Reliability Consultants of AEA Technology) and the institution of Quality Assurance (IQA), and supported by the European Safety and Reliability Association (ESRA).

The advancements in decision sciences theory and applications can be regarded as a continuously emerging field in all areas of interest including technology, industry, energy, healthcare, education, agriculture, social sciences, and more. Managers in all disciplines face an endless list of complex issues every day. One of the essential managerial skills is the ability to allocate and utilize limited resources appropriately in the efforts of achieving optimal performance efficiently. This is no less important for those who work in the transportation sector. The Handbook of Research on Decision Sciences and Applications in the Transportation Sector explores the importance of decision sciences and the ways in which they apply to the transportation sector. This book covers technologies and tools including machine learning, mathematical modeling, and simulation and their applications in such tasks as reducing fuel costs, improving passenger flow, and ensuring vehicle safety. It is an essential reference source for managers, professionals in the transport industry, supply chain specialists, safety officers, IT consultants, executives, practitioners, scientists, students, researchers, and academicians.