Stefano Barone is assistant professor of Statistics for experimental and technological research at the University of Palermo, Italy. He is moving as associate professor at the Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden

Background
Human beings develop and produce increasingly complex systems constituted of many interrelated and interacting components. Human beings are themselves such a kind of complex systems.

During their life, complex systems are unavoidably subject to failures. Failures are random events, their randomness due to: a) constructive imperfections, b) partly unpredictable conditions of operation, and c) natural phenomena of degradation.

The random nature of failures has stimulated researchers during the last decades to study methods for predicting and assessing the reliability, and methods for developing robust systems, i.e. as much insensitive as possible to the unavoidable variation affecting them during their life cycle.

Particularly important in the so called