Risk analysis

The idea of a series of International Conferences on Risk Analysis initiated almost 10 years ago when Lutz Edler and Christos Kitsos were working together on a project on Cancer Risk Assessment. The International Statistical Institute – Committee on Risk Analysis (ISI- CRA) backed up the idea and the first Conference was organised with great success, in Athens in 2003 by the Technological Educational Institute of Athens. The main focus of the conference was on cancer risk management and assessment. As a result the acronym of the conference was ICCRA (International Conference on Cancer Risk Assessment). ICCRA2 and ICCRA3 followed the first successful conference. ICCRA2 took place in the Greek island of Santorini in 2007 and ICCRA3 in Porto Heli, Greece in 2009. Two important international publications came out of the above three events. The book titled Recent Advances in Quantitative Methods in Cancer and Human Risk Assessment (2007, Wiley) was the product of the joint efforts of Christos Kitsos and Lutz Edler. Volume 15 of the international publication series Biometrie und Medizinische Informatik Greifswalder Seminarberichte (2009, Shaker Verlag) was the result of the editorial work of Christos Kitsos, Alex Rigas, and Karl-Ernst Biebler. In 2009, a proposal was put forward to drop from the acronym one “C’ (for Cancer) and expand the conference theme to cover risk analysis and assessment in various other directions (finance, reliability, biomedicine etc). The proposal was accepted and ICRA4 got on its way. Through this conference and the future ones, we attempt to bring together scientists from all over the world that work on Risk Analysis with applications to the risk assessment and management in Life, Biological and Environmental Sciences & Public Health, Economics & Finance, and in the Reliability of Engineering, Technical, Biological & Biomedical Systems. Our main objective is to assemble researchers and practitioners from universities, institutions and industries from around the world, involved in these fields, and to encourage mutual exchange. The “Biometrie und Medizinische Informatik – Greifswalder Seminarberichte” is an international publication series edited in general by Karl-Ernst Biebler and Bernd Jäger and published by Shaker Verlag on behalf of the Institut für Biometrie und Medizinische Informatik of Ernst-Moritz-Arndt-Universität Greifswald. The present issue of this publication series with the short title Risk Analysis Selected papers from ICRA4 consists of papers presented at ICRA4 that represent a cross-section of current concerns and research interests in biometry, biomedicine, finance and reliability. The papers appear in alphabetical order using the name of the first author.