Assessing changes in reliability methods over time: An unsupervised text mining approach

Reliability engineering faces many of the same challenges today that it did at its inception in the 1950s. The fundamental issue remains uncertainty in system representation, specifically related to performance model structure and parameterization. Details of a design are unavailable early in the development process and therefore performance models must either account for the range of possibilities or be wrong. Increasing system complexity has compounded this uncertainty. In this work, we seek to understand how the reliability engineering literature has shifted over time. We exe cute a systematic literature review of 30,543 reliability engineering papers (covering roughly a third of the reliability papers indexed by Elsevier's Engineering Village. Topic modeling was performed on the abstracts of those papers to identify 279 topics. The hierarchical topic reduction resulted in the identification of eight top‐level method topics (prognostics, statistics, maintenance, quality control, management, physics of failure, modeling, and risk assessment) as well as three domain‐specific topics (nuclear, infrastructure, and software). We found that topics more associated with later phases in the development process (such as prognostics, maintenance, and quality control) have increased in popularity over time relative to other topics. We propose that this is a response to the challenges posed by model uncertainty and increasing complexity.