This book is dedicated to Jinhua Cao on the occasion of his 80th birthday. The title
“Stochastic Models in Reliability, Network Security and System Safety” reflects the
research interests and achievements of this outstanding scientist. Jinhua is an ordinary
Chinese scientist with a complete historical experience: from the victory in World
War II to the rapid economic growth of China; from the behindhand environment of
science and technology to their fast development in China. During such a critical
development period of China, Jinhua has been able to combine high-level innovation
ability in scientific work with remarkable successes and opportunities in high administrative and organizational positions. In the research field of reliability in China, he has
played a key role in not only theoretical research and engineering applications but also
in cultivating more and more students and engineering technicians, many of whom
have become outstanding talents and excellent leaders in a lot of enterprises and
industries related to reliability in China. In addition, we also need to emphasize that one
of Jinhua’s main contributions to China is that through offering many early classes and
courses of reliability, he cultivated a lot of reliability talents who successfully fulfilled
the urgent need of many practical areas in the process of China’s economic development, such as machinery, electronics, aerospace, weaponry, and so forth. Therefore, the
high admiration that Jinhua enjoys in the scientific community in China and even all
over the world was witnessed by the enthusiastic response from the contributors of this
book.