Mission: This IEEE Transactions on Reliability is a refereed journal for the reliability and allied disciplines including, but not limited to, maintainability, physics of failure, life testing, prognostics, design and manufacture for reliability, reliability for systems of systems, network availability, mission success, warranty, safety, cybersecurity, privacy, trustworthy computing, and various measures of effectiveness.

Topics eligible for publications range:

    from hardware to software,
    from materials to systems,
    from consumer & industrial devices to manufacturing plants,
    from individual items to networks, and
    from techniques for making things better to ways of predicting/measuring behavior in the field.

As an engineering subject that supports new and existing technologies, we constantly expand into new areas of the assurance sciences.

Topics not eligible for publication include routine mathematical exercises on well-known topics that do not provide a useful insight or tool for a manager, engineer, scientist, or theoretician.

When writing a paper to submit to our Transactions, be sure to write clearly, correctly, concise, consistently, with contribution, and be convincing. Always make your key contribution obvious, and make clear to the reader why they should take interest in your paper.

Submission of Manuscripts: The Transactions on Reliability now offers the option to publish via either Open Access or traditional means! In either case the journal maintains review integrity and quality of publishing. You have the option of submission of your manuscript for IEEE Open Access at a discounted rate of $2,495* To find out more, click here.

As of 1/1/2014, the IEEE Transactions on Reliability has converted to using Manuscript Central. All submissions, reviews, status updates, and communications about Transactions on Reliability business for any paper submitted in 2014 or later should be worked through our website: http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/tr-ieee

The articles in this journal are peer reviewed in accordance with the requirements set forth in the IEEE Publication Services and Products Board Operations Manual (https://pspb.ieee.org/images/files/files/opsmanual.pdf). Each published article was reviewed by three independent reviewers using a single-anonymous peer review process, where the identities of the reviewers are not known to the authors, but the reviewers know the identities of the authors. Articles will be screened for plagiarism before acceptance.

* View the Editorial Board and Review Policy of IEEE Transactions on Reliability.

• When submitting a manuscript, the authors must classify their regular and journal first submission into the following categories:

    Category A: This category focuses on systems and networks in computer software and hardware. It addresses critical aspects of enhancing reliability, security, and trust. Key areas include reliability and security modeling, rigorous testing, cybersecurity, emerging technologies like IoT and AI, and trusted computing. This comprehensive approach not only mitigates risks but also drives innovation in adapting to evolving technological challenges. The subcategories include:
        A1: Reliability and Security Modeling, Statistical Analysis, and Simulation
        A2: Application or Empirical Studies: Computer Hardware and Software Systems
        A3: Software and Hardware Testing, Verification, Security, and Quality Assurance
        A4: Cybersecurity, Privacy, Cryptography, Safety, Dependability, and Resilience
        A5: IoT, Autonomous Driving, Blockchains, Mobile and Cloud Computing
        A6: AI, Machine Learning, Trustworthy AI, AI Security, and Data Science
        A7: Intrusion Detection, Threat Intelligence, Malware and Vulnerability Analysis
        A8: Trust, Trustworthiness, and Trusted Computing

    Category B: This category focuses on reliability and management in industrial applications. It emphasizes ensuring robustness and efficiency in industry-specific systems. Critical areas include the importance of prognostics and health management. It also covers network reliability and security, and focuses on managing system degradation and maintenance. Collectively, these areas contribute to optimizing operational performance and mitigating risks in industrial environments. The subcategories include:
        B1: Reliability of Industry Applications and Information Processing
        B2: Prognostics and Health Management
        B3: Application or Empirical Studies: Device, Engineering or Mechanical Systems
        B4: Network Reliability and Security
        B5: Degradation and Maintenance

In addition, four ongoing special sections are soliciting submissions addressing emerging cyber threats:

    TRel-TAAD: Special Section on Trustworthy AI for Autonomous Driving
    TRel-SR6G: Special Section on Security and Reliability of 5G/6G Mobile Networks
    TRel-ECTIS: Special Section on Enterprise Cybersecurity and Threat Intelligence at Scale
    TRel-HS: Special Section on Hardware Security

Special Issue on Trustworthy AI for Autonomous Driving
Submission Date: 2025-05-31

Background

Autonomous driving technologies have made phenomenal progress and shown significant societal and economic impacts. Recent breakthroughs in artificial intelligence (AI), especially deep learning technologies, demonstrate their importance in developing autonomous driving systems. However, due to the limited understanding of the underlying deep learning theories and the vulnerability of the technologies to out-of-distribution and adversarial scenarios, there is an increasing concern if decisions made by the systems can be trusted in life-critical use cases. Moreover, new AI approaches for autonomous driving introduces new challenges for software system verification of reliability, security, and safety.

To address the challenges, IEEE Transactions on Reliability will have a special section soliciting original work that makes novel theoretical or practical contributions to enable trustworthy AI for autonomous driving. Specifically, through the lens of trustworthy computing, trustworthy AI concerns the reliability, security, and safety of AI software systems for autonomous driving. In addition, systems should be extended with properties such as fairness, robustness, interpretability, and more. Furthermore, a whole new set of verification techniques should be invented to handle novel artifacts. Submissions will be reviewed and selected based on innovation, technical correctness, presentation, and practical relevance.

Topics

We welcome submissions in, but not limited to, the following topic areas:

    Reliability, security, and safety of autonomous driving systems
    Trustworthy AI software or system architecture
    Formal methods for verification with extensions of fairness, robustness, and interpretability
    Explainable, transparent, interpretable, verifiable, and certifiable artificial intelligence systems
    Advice-taking and advisable autonomous driving systems
    Privacy-preserving and responsible artificial intelligence
    Data and model governance
    Dataset bias
    Out-of-distribution detection
    Adversarial attack and defense
    Deep traffic scene understanding and comprehension
    Risk assessment and risk-aware decision making in traffic scenes
    Uncertainty modeling and runtime verification

Submission Information

We welcome high-quality submissions that are original work, not published, and not currently submitted elsewhere. We also encourage extensions to conference papers, unless prohibited by copyright, if there is a significant difference in technical content. Improvements such as adding a new case study or including a description of additional related studies do not satisfy this requirement. A description explaining the differences between the conference paper and the journal submission is required. The overlap between each submission and other articles, including the authors' own papers and dissertations, should be less than 30%.

All submitted papers will undergo a rigorous peer-review process and must conform to the double-column, the single-spaced format of printed articles in the IEEE Transactions on Reliability with all figures and tables embedded in the paper, rather than listed at the end or in the appendix. Refer to the special guidelines posted at https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/tr-ieee.

Important Dates

Submission Deadline:
	05/31/2025, rolling review and publication
Publication Date:
	Rolling

Editor-in-Chief

    Professor Winston Shieh
    Department of Computer Science, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, Taiwan
    Email: shiuhpyng@ieee.org

Guest Editors

    Professor Yi-Ting Chen
    Department of Computer Science, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, Taiwan
    Email: ychen@cs.nycu.edu.tw
    Professor Jinkyu Kim
    Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Korea University, Korea
    Email: jinkyukim@korea.ac.kr
    Professor Ding Zhao
    Department of Mechanical Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
    Email: dingzhao@andrew.cmu.edu
    Doctor Olaf Op den Camp
    Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research, Netherlands
    Email: olaf.opdencamp@tno.nl

Special Issue on Security and Reliability of 5G/6G Mobile Networks
Submission Date: 2025-05-31

Background

As the 5G mobile network has been rolling out in recent years, its new network architecture, technologies, and security mechanisms have been widely deployed, including SBA (Service-based Architecture), network slicing, NR (New Radio), 5G-AKA (Authentication and Key Agreement), to name a few. Many exciting applications are thus going to emerge, such as V2X (Vehicle-to-Everything), VR (Virtual Reality) and smart factory, but the examination of the 5G mobile network for new practical challenges and concerns from the security and reliability aspects (e.g., zero-trust goals and ultrahigh reliability requirement from smart factory) is still at the early phase. As the largest wireless network infrastructure, the security and reliability of the 5G mobile network are extremely important, especially that national security may suffer from its failure. Furthermore, the standardization of the 6G mobile network is going to start in the near future; it can benefit from the new insights and lessons learned from 5G research studies.

To make 5G/6G mobile networks secure and reliable, IEEE Transactions on Reliability (TRel) solicits original work that makes novel theoretical or practical contributions to enhance the security and reliability of the 5G mobile network. In addition, the research studies about newly proposed security and reliability mechanisms for potential 6G architecture and technologies are also welcome. Papers will be reviewed and selected based on their innovation, technical correctness, presentation, and practical relevance.

Topics

Submissions related to the following topics from the security and reliability aspects are encouraged. However, others relevant to security and reliability of 5G/6G mobile networks are also welcome.

    5G NR (New Radio)
    5G private network
    5G Internet of Things (IoT)
    5G edge/fog computing and networking
    5G mobile sensing and applications
    5G localization and location-based services
    5G O-RAN (Open Radio Access Network)
    5G network slicing and virtualization
    5G network management and orchestration
    5G/6G core network
    5G/6G RAN (Radio Access Network)
    5G/6G network architecture
    5G/6G network/security protocols
    AI/ML (Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning) in 5G/6G networks
    CPS (Cyber-Physical Systems)
    Autonomous vehicles
    Communications over sky/sea/space
    Extreme and ubiquitous communications
    Intelligent networking between humans and things

Submission Information

We welcome high quality submissions that are original work, not published, and not currently submitted elsewhere. We also encourage extensions to conference papers, unless prohibited by copyright, if there is a significant difference in technical content. Improvements such as adding a new case study or including a description of additional related studies do not satisfy this requirement. The overlap between each submission and other articles, including the authors' own papers, should be less than 30%. Each submission must conform to the double column single spaced format of printed articles in the IEEE Transactions on Reliability with all figures and tables embedded in the paper, rather than listed at the end or in the appendix. More information on how to prepare and submit manuscripts can be found at http://rs.ieee.org/transactions-on-reliability.html.

Important Dates

Submission Deadline:
	05/31/2025, rolling review and publication
Publication Date:
	Rolling

Editor-in-Chief

    Professor Winston Shieh
    Department of Computer Science, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, Taiwan
    Email: shiuhpyng@ieee.org

Guest Editors

    Associate Professor Chi-Yu Li
    Department of Computer Science, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, Taiwan
    Email: chiyuli@cs.nctu.edu.tw
    Assistant Professor Guan-Hua Tu
    Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Michigan State University, USA
    Email: ghtu@msu.edu

Special Issue on Enterprise Cybersecurity and Threat Intelligence at Scale
Submission Date: 2025-05-31

Background

Today's enterprise is by default connected in all aspects. The interactions with customers, businesses, and computer networks have created global-scale business opportunities and security risks for enterprises. Therefore, enterprises are in dire need of solutions that would maximize business opportunities while keeping the risk of security threats low. Unfortunately, the prevalence of security incidents indicates that existing security mechanisms have reached their limits in dealing with security risks at scale. A higher-level of automation and intelligence needs to be integrated into the security mechanisms to deal with the security threats faced by the enterprises today effectively. Meanwhile, classic fault tolerance mechanisms are also challenged by the scale of today's enterprise and the presence of malicious actors. New perspectives are needed for understanding how we can effectively manage the security risks faced by today's enterprise while maximizing the business strength at the same time.

In this special section, we solicit high-quality submissions related to enterprise cybersecurity and threat intelligence. In particular, we especially welcome papers that tackle problems pertaining to the asymmetric cyber warfare faced by the enterprises and the undesirable expansion of attack surfaces as we increase the scale of business.

Topics

We welcome submissions in, but not limited to, the following topic areas:

    Cyber threats and risk analysis
    Threat intelligence
    Automated incident response
    Decentralized finance security
    Security issues of decentralized blockchain applications
    Artificial intelligence/machine learning-based security
    Moving target defense for enterprises
    Cloud security
    Zero-trust architecture
    Cyber-physical systems security
    Advanced methods for error detection, fault tolerance, and debugging
    Software quality, metrics, and measurements, estimation, and prediction of quality/reliability
    Dependability, survivability, and resilience of software systems
    Systems (hardware and software) reliability engineering
    Productivity evaluation and improvement
    Services reliability engineering
    Supporting tools and automation
    Industry best practices

Submission Information

We welcome high-quality submissions that are original work, not published, and not currently submitted elsewhere. We also encourage extensions to conference papers, unless prohibited by copyright, if there is a significant difference in technical content. Improvements such as adding a new case study or including a description of additional related studies do not satisfy this requirement. A description explaining the differences between the conference paper and the journal submission is required. The overlap between each submission and other articles, including the authors' own papers and dissertations, should be less than 30%.

All submitted papers will undergo a rigorous peer-review process and must conform to the double-column, the single-spaced format of printed articles in the IEEE Transactions on Reliability with all figures and tables embedded in the paper, rather than listed at the end or in the appendix. Refer to the special guidelines posted at https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/tr-ieee.

Important Dates

Submission Deadline:
	05/31/2025, rolling review and publication
Publication Date:
	Rolling

Editor-in-Chief

    Professor Winston Shieh
    Department of Computer Science, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, Taiwan
    Email: shiuhpyng@ieee.org

Guest Editors

    Professor Yu-Sung Wu
    Department of Computer Science, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, Taiwan
    Email: ysw@nycu.edu.tw
    Dr. Gaspar Modelo-Howard
    Palo Alto Networks, United States of America
    Email: gaspar@acm.org
    Professor Jin Hong
    School of Physics, Maths and Computing, Computer Science and Software Engineering, The University of Western Australia, Australia
    Email: jin.hong@uwa.edu.au

Special Issue on Hardware Security
Submission Date: 2025-05-31

Background

Due to escalating complexity of hardware design and manufacturing, integrated circuits (ICs) are usually designed and fabricated in multiple locations worldwide. With the utilization of third-party intellectual properties (IPs) and offshore foundries, the overall cost and time-to-market are significantly reduced. However, hardware security becomes more subject to various kinds of tampering in the IC supply chain. At the design stage, the malicious insertion of Trojan circuits as well as IC/IP privacy (theft) are the main threats to hardware security and trustworthiness; at the fabrication stage, there is the threat of cloning and overprocducing ICs at an offshore foundry; when the hardware is deployed, sensitive data can be extracted using hardware-based side channels, physical attacks, reverse engineering, etc. Over the past decade, hundreads of attacks have been reported and the number of attacks continues to rise.

In this special section, we solicit high-quality submissions related to hardware security. Specifically, we welcome papers that address the security issues across different stages in the IC supply chain and during the IC lifecycle. Submissions will be reviewed and selected based on innovation, practical relevance, technical correctness and presentation.

Topics

We welcome submissions in, but not limited to, the following topic areas:

    IC/IP protection against piracy and overproduction
    Hardware Trojan detection and isolation
    Side channel attacks and countermeasures
    Physical attacks and countermeasures
    Trustworthy manufacturing, e.g., split manufacturing
    Non-destructive reverse engineering
    Recycling, remarked, out-of-spec ICs
    Hardware security primitives: PUFs and TRNGs

Submission Information

We welcome high-quality submissions that are original work, not published, and not currently submitted elsewhere. We also encourage extensions to conference papers, unless prohibited by copyright, if there is a significant difference in technical content. Improvements such as adding a new case study or including a description of additional related studies do not satisfy this requirement. A description explaining the differences between the conference paper and the journal submission is required. The overlap between each submission and other articles, including the authors' own papers and dissertations, should be less than 30%.

All submitted papers will undergo a rigorous peer-review process and must conform to the double-column, the single-spaced format of printed articles in the IEEE Transactions on Reliability with all figures and tables embedded in the paper, rather than listed at the end or in the appendix. Refer to the special guidelines posted at https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/tr-ieee.

Important Dates

Submission Deadline:
	05/31/2025, rolling review and publication
Publication Date:
	Rolling

Editor-in-Chief

    Professor Winston Shieh
    Department of Computer Science, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, Taiwan
    Email: shiuhpyng@ieee.org

Guest Editors

    Professor Kai-Chiang Wu
    Department of Computer Science, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, Taiwan
    Email: kcw@cs.nctu.edu.tw
    Professor Siddharth Garg
    Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, New York University, USA
    Email: sg175@nyu.edu
    Professor Yier Jin
    Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Florida, USA
    Email: yier.jin@ece.ufl.edu
    Professor Hussam Amrouch
    Institute of Computer Architecture and Computer Engineering, University of Stuttgart, Germany
    Email: amrouch@iti.uni-stuttgart.de
    Professor Sying-Jyan Wang
    Department of Electrical Engineering, National Chung Hsing University, Taiwan
    Email: sjwang@cs.nchu.edu.tw