Fuzzy Sets in the Evaluation of Reliability

Abstract

Theory of reliability is more than fifty years old. Its basic concepts were established in the 1950s as useful tools for the analysis of complex technical systems. The rapid development of the theory of reliability was closely related to the importance of its main field of applications - military and space. For this reason the origins of the research in the area of reliability are still not well known. Ralph A. Evans, one of the founders of the IEEE Transactions on Reliability, wrote in an Editorial in this journal that all important theoretical results published in the 1960s and 1970s had been already obtained even in the 1950s, and for many years remained classified. The authors of the most important publications on reliability from those years belonged to the group of the most important scientists working in theory of probability, mathematical statistics, electronics and computer sciences.