Book excerpt: These three volumes comprise the papers presented at the ESREL '97 International Conference on Safety and Reliability held in Lisbon, Portugal, 17-20 June 1997. The purpose of the annual ESREL conferences is to provide a forum for the presentation of technical and scientific papers covering both methods and applications of safety and reliability to a wide range of industrial sectors and technical disciplines and, in so doing, to enhance cross-fertilization between them. A broad view is taken of safety and reliability which includes probabilistically-based methods, or, more generally, methods that deal with the quantification of the uncertainty in the knowledge of the real world and with decision-making under this uncertainty. The areas covered include: design and product liability; availability, reliability and maintainability; assessment and management of risks to technical systems; health and the environment; and mathematical methods of reliability and statistical analysis of data. The organization of the book closely follows the sessions of the conference with each of the three volumes containing papers from two parallel sessions, comprising a total of 270 papers by authors from 35 countries.