Preface

This book contains close to 600 abstracts of the scientific and industry contributions from the 31st European Safety and Reliability Conference – ESREL 2021 –, held in Angers, France and organised by Université d'Angers and the European Safety and Reliability Association (ESRA). The full papers are published as Open Access papers on the following website: http://esrel2021.org/en/index.html.

For more than 30 years now, ESREL has been one of the key annual events for meetings and knowledge exchange in order to innovate for a better control of risks, and safety and optimization of the performance of socio-technological systems. The Conference has become well established in the international community, attracting a good mix of academic and industry participants that present and discuss subjects of interest and application across various industries in the fields of Safety, Reliability and Risk.

This conference comes to France for the fifth time (in addition to an earlier one in 1989 in La Baule). The last edition organized in France was in 2011 in Troyes. Université d'Angers can be seen as a young university (we celebrate its 50th anniversary this year) with a very long history (it was created in 1364 by King Charles V and recognized by the Pope in 1436). It trains more than 23,000 students and delivers more than 402 degrees in more than 100 specialties. Polytech Angers, the engineering school of Université d’Angers has developed undergraduate and graduate programs in quality, reliability and safety engineering and risk management.

This year the theme of the Conference is "Guaranteeing in an accelerating world". The Conference covers a number of topics within safety, reliability and risk, and provides a forum for presentation and discussion of scientific papers covering theory, methods and applications to a wide range of sectors and problem areas.

This year, the Conference programme includes a total of 593 communications (454 full-papers and 139 abstracts) from prestigious authors coming from all over the world, and selected by the Technical Programme Committee to guarantee the quality and the consistency of the program.

The review process was mainly organised by the Technical Area Coordinators (most of which are the Chairmen of the ESRA Technical Committees) and the review process was made by a large number of anonymous reviewers which are gratefully acknowledged for their contributions to the improvement of quality of the papers. The members of the Technical Programme Committee (most of them members of the ESRA Technical Committees) have shared a great part of the review process and are important contributors to the Conference organization.

Bruno Castanier, Marko Cepin, David Bigaud and Christophe Bérenguer
Editors