The ENBIS-16 quality and reliability engineering international special issue

It is with great pleasure and pride that I introduce to you this special issue of papers presented at the 10th Annual Conference of ENBIS, The European Network for Business and Industrial Statistics. The conference was held at the beautiful location of the University of Antwerp with Professor Martina Vandebroek as the Programme Committee chair and Professor Peter Goos as the Organising Committee chair. The 87 page book of abstracts can be downloaded from www.enbis.org/docs/5875_7696774968.pdf. This special issue presents eleven papers based on papers presented at the conference. They provide a flavor of the topics discussed by ENBIS members, at ENBIS conferences. In ten years, ENBIS has expanded to over 1400 members from European and non-European countries, who are sharing its vision and mission of promoting statistical applications in business and industry and of stimulating academic research in new directions reflecting the problems and challenges faced by real-life applications. At ENBIS10, the Box Medal was awarded to one of the founders of ENBIS, Dave Stewardson. Dave was quick to see the opportunities in a European Network and was enthusiastic right from the start when a meeting was called in Amsterdam in 2000. He was successful in obtaining European Commission funding for a thematic network to develop ENBIS, called pro-ENBIS, that ran for 3 years from 2002 to 2004 and brought together 37 partners from 18 countries. The Pro-ENBIS work packages focused on the design of experiments, data mining, statistical modeling, reliability and management statistics as well as discovering European resources and expertize and drafting ideas for future ENBIS activity. Dave was the Director of the Industrial Statistics Research Unit (ISRU) at Newcastle University, UK, and led many exciting statistical projects making a permanent name and excellent reputation for ISRU. Dave gave a thought provoking and humorous acceptance Box medal speech and was warmly applauded by his friends and colleagues in ENBIS. In this 10th anniversary conference, the president session was dedicated to the Legacy of the Department of Statistics at the University of Wisconsin and Soren Bisgaard, who unfortunately passed away earlier that year. The original ideas of George Box to combine research and applications in promoting and developing statistics have greatly influenced ENBIS and are at the root of its vision and mission. The ENBIS presidents are elected to further develop and consolidate these original objectives. In sequence the past ENBIS presidents are: Henry Wynn, Dave Stewardson, Tony Greenfield, Poul Thyregod, Shirley Coleman, Fabrizio Ruggeri, Ron Kenett and Andrea Ahlemeyer-Stubbe. Quality and Reliability Engineering International has been a close partner of ENBIS and publishes, every year, a special issue based on the papers presented at ENBIS conferences. With the growing number of papers and submission, the task of the special issue editor has become increasingly complex. In putting together this special issue several reviewers made important contributions by reviewing both form and content. Without their help, we would have never reached our goals of quality and timeliness, and they deserve sincere thanks. The reviewers were: J. MacKay, I. Ben-Gal. S. Figini, M. Testik, M. Reis, I. Yahav, S. Coleman, S. Biffignandi, L. Mitchell, O. Roustant, E. Bashkanski, S. Kuhnt and A. Forbes. Thanks are also due to Ms Emma Missen from the QREI editorial office for her help and guidance throughout the long and meandering editorial process. This is also an opportunity to thank the outgoing president, Professor Irena Ograjenšek, for her contribution to the growth of ENBIS on its journey from good to Great and wish success and a productive presidency to the current president elect of ENBIS, who is taking office in September 2011, Professor Xavier Tort-Martorell. I hope you will enjoy the papers and get motivated to participate in future ENBIS conferences. More information on ENBIS can be found at www.enbis.org.