Evolution of reliability engineering discipline over the last six decades: a comprehensive review

The field of reliability engineering has undergone evolutionary progress and breakthroughs during the last six decades. This paper provides a historical perspective of significant developments and systematically enumerates contributions in the field of reliability engineering since the beginning. This paper further delves into the relevance and development of various statistical methods for data and reliability analysis, diagram‐based models, analytical methods, physics‐of‐failure and fuzzy logic‐based reliability tools and techniques that have shaped the emergence of the reliability engineering discipline. Finally, this paper highlights limitations with existing reliability analysis methods and identifies a few potential opportunities for further research.