It is our pleasure to introduce this special issue of Quality and Reliability Engineering International, featuring selected papers from the 5th International Conference on System Reliability and Safety Engineering (SRSE 2023), held in Beijing, China, from December 20 to 23, 2023. SRSE 2023 provided an international forum for researchers and practitioners to exchange recent advances in reliability, safety, maintenance, prognostics and health management and related methodological developments. After the conference, selected authors were invited to submit extended versions of their work for consideration in this special issue, and these submissions underwent a further round of peer review in accordance with the journal's standards. This special issue collects 20 papers, reflecting the breadth of current research in system reliability and safety engineering. Together, they highlight both the continued importance of foundational reliability theory and the growing influence of data-driven and intelligent methods in modern engineering applications. Across the issue, readers will find contributions on system reliability modelling, resource allocation, reliability demonstration testing, maintenance optimisation, degradation analysis, fault diagnosis, remaining useful life prediction, accelerated degradation testing, software reliability, quality evaluation and risk assessment under uncertainty. The contributions may be broadly grouped into three themes: (1) reliability modelling, system design, optimisation and testing; (2) maintenance, degradation and prognostics; and (3) software reliability, quality evaluation and risk analysis. A second major theme concerns maintenance, degradation and prognostics. Together, these papers reflect the increasing importance of integrating degradation information, condition monitoring data and operational context into reliability analysis and maintenance decision-making. Overall, the papers in this special issue show a field that is evolving in response to increasingly complex systems, richer data environments and growing demands for robust decision support. We believe that the contributions collected here provide readers with a valuable overview of recent developments and further point to promising directions for future research. We would like to express our sincere thanks to all the authors for their valuable contributions, and to the anonymous reviewers for their careful and constructive comments. We also thank the editorial team of Quality and Reliability Engineering International for their support throughout the review and production process. We hope this special issue will stimulate further research in this important and rapidly developing field.
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