National Conference on Reliability and Safety (NCRS) has been a major outreach event of SRESA at National Level. Discussions for organizing NCRS started happening only after ICRESH-2010 held in Mumbai. It was realized that a reliability and safety event should be organized with at least a periodicity of one year at pan-Bharat level. This was based on two major factors, ICRESH events were organized every five years and second the researchers, academics and scholars should have an opportunity, at least once in a year, to present and discuss their research finding as also industry should be able to present and discuss their applied work. These and many more inputs laid the foundation for SRESA’s new product – THE NCRS. Five NCRS events have successfully been organized in past 10 years i.e., during years 2014 – 2024. NCRS has become one of the major national events in risk and reliability.

The First NCRS was held in University College of Engineering Bharathidasan Institute of Technology (BIT) Campus Anna University, Tiruchirappalli during 13 – 15 February 2014. Trichy was the excellent location to start NCRS as the Kalani Dam located near Trichy is the epitome of Structural Reliability. The Interesting fact about Kallanai is that this dam built in 2nd Century almost crossing 2000 years which surpasses reliability indexes of many structures. The architecture style and their creativity making us to feel grateful. The dam was initially constructed and opened during the Chola King Karikalan in Chola dynasty (Ref: https://factins.com/top-6-oldest-functioning-dams-in-india/).

Second, the importance of the Trichy conference was that this event set the ball rolling for the future NCRS events. The conference proceedings entitled SRESA National – Reliability and Safety Engineering, comprised of over 80 publications spread over three parallel sessions for the three days. The book was edited by P.V. Varde, P. Vaishnavi, S. Sujatha and A Valarmathi. Dr. (Ms.) M.K. Vaishnavi played the leading role in organizing NCRS-1.

The Centre for Reliability (CFR), Chennai took the lead in organizing the second NCRS in Chennai. The CFR is the only Government of India’s centre of excellence exclusively dedicated to reliability modelling, testing and analysis. And therefore, very relevant to host the Second NCRS. The three days conference was held in Anna University Campus, Chennai in the from 8 -10th October 2015. A wonderful team with Dr R. Muthukumar and Dr Radhika as lead supported by CFR staff had all the ingredients for a successful national event. In this sense the CFR team demonstrated the organizing capability through the 2 nd NCRS event.

3rd NCRS was organized by the Dept. of Mathematics, Sri Sivasubramaniya College of Engineering (SSNCE) during 1 – 3 December, 2016. By the time we entered 3rd NCRS the broad features and programmes were standardised. The 16 invited talks by imminent academician and researchers captured the imaginations the researchers and scholars participated in this conference. The proceedings comprising of over 90 contributory papers formed the proceedings of the 3rd NCRS. A souvenir edited by Dr. R. Sujatha et. al provided the short abstracts of the plenary sessions comprised of invited talks as well as contributory talks.

As the computational, sensor and AI technologies were evolving and finding wider opportunities and applications the field of risk and reliability was also transforming fast and the same was reflected in the technical sessions of 4 th NCRS. The advanced fields like software engineering, data analytics, decision support, prognostics, condition monitoring, integrated with optimization, and machine learning techniques were bringing a new wave of advanced reliability technology. The 4 th NCRS witnessed this fresh air which was all set to transform or make a paradigm shift in risk and reliability. The 4 th NCRS was organized at PDPM Indian Institute of Information Technology, Jabalpur in January 2018. Dr. V.K. Gupta and Dr. P.K Kankar were the team lead from Jabalpur. Evem Apart from plenary sessions The technical sessions comprised of 48 invited and contributory talks organized in three parallel sessions each session was dedicated to a specific theme. The proceedings of the conference entitled Reliability and Risk Assessment in Engineering – Proceedings of Int. conference on Reliability and Safety 2018 was published by Springer.

5 th NCRS was held during 10 – 12 March 2022 in virtual mode due to Covid situation. The SRESA, Chennai chapter was entrusted for organizing 5 th NCRS. Organizing the national conference in virtual mode itself was a new experience. One of the major insights was that national conferences can be organized in virtual with a minimal budget. Some also opined that in-person attendance enhances effectiveness of exchanges, discussions that creates scopes for new ideas, collaboration and improved understanding of partners position and interests. With these insights SRESA might consider the hybrid mode for at least national seminars and Distinguished Speaker Talks. Based on selected full-length papers during the technical sessions of the conference a book entitled ‘Advances in Reliability and Safety Management for critical system’, Co-edited by C. Senthil Kumar, R. Sujatha, R. Muthukumar, K. Balaji Rao, Ragu Prakash and Prabhakar V Varde was published by Springer. Prof. Raghu Prakash and Dr. K. Balaji Rao were the Co-chair and Prof. Prabhakar V. Varde was the General Chair – NCRS.