Ingeborg de Pater attends ESREL conference & wins Professor Stein Haugen Paper award

The first week of September, I attended the ESREL conference (European Conference on Safety and Reliability). The conference was held in Southampton this year, where the weather was unexpectedly warm and nice. Southampton is an old harbour city in the south of the United Kingdom. Parts of the old town walls are still standing, which is very impressive. Moreover, it is the town from which the Titanic departed; Throughout the city, there were speakers where you could listen to eyewitness reports from survivors of the Titanic. Of course, safety and reliability were not considered very well in the construction of the Titanic, and as such, the city was the perfect place to discuss the importance of safety and reliability in future projects.

The conference itself hosted some very interesting keynote speakers. As fitting for a port city, the maritime world was well represented; Dr. Ingrid Bouwer gave a talk on risk in maritime systems, and professor Jan Erik Vinnem on risk assessment in offshore petroleum platforms. Also the parallel sessions covered some very interesting presentations, on assessing the health of systems with limited data.

In one of the parallel sessions, I presented my work on developing health indicators with limited sensor measurements from faulty, degraded systems. For the corresponding paper, I won the new Professor Stein Haugen Paper award, named after a professor from Norway in the field of risk management who passed away last year. One of the other three winners, Guus Rongen, is also from the TU Delft, so our university did quite well.

All in all, it was a very interesting conference, where I met many other scientists, had interesting discussions about maintenance and learned about exciting new research directions in the field of  reliability and safety.