Preface: reliability and quality management in stochastic systems

Abstract

This special issue of the Annals of Operations Research is related to the Asia-Pacific International Symposium on Advanced Reliability and Maintenance Modeling (APARM 2016), held during 24-26 August 2016, at the Hanyang University, Seoul, South Korea. It focuses on new international research in theoretical and related applications to solve quality management problems. Reliability and quality management are quite important in many practical stochastic systems, such as computer systems, logistic systems, production systems, and the like. Developing and applying operations research methods to measure the robustness and to solve the engineering problem of a stochastic system is indeed a crucial task, enabling the system manager to carry out improvements after measuring the stochastic system.