About the Quality, Statistics & Reliability Section

About the Quality, Statistics & Reliability Section

The Quality, Statistics, and Reliability (QSR) is an interdisciplinary section, comprised of members from industrial and systems engineering, statistics and business communities. The purpose of the QSR Section is to encourage discussion and interaction among individuals having an interest in Quality, Statistics and Reliability research. With the continuous efforts of members from 50+ countries/regions all over the world, QSR has made significant progresses, and has become the home for many academicians.

QSR has been considered as one of the most active sections within INFORMS. Along the way, our section made many significant progresses, providing a home section for faculty and students in the departments of industrial and operations engineering, system engineering, statistics, and business/management who are interested in research and education in the field of QSR. 

As the QSR section moves toward its 20th anniversary, we are proud to announce the QSR 20th Anniversary Workshop to celebrate the past accomplishments, assess the present status, and plan for the future. More information on the workshop can be found here.

QSR sponsors a cluster of technical sessions at the INFORMS annual conference. QSR maintains, on average, nearly 40 sessions for the four-day annual conference, which makes QSR one of the most active subdivisions within INFORMS. QSR’s paper sessions cover a broad spectrum of topics related to Quality, Statistics, and Reliability research and many of them address emerging data-rich or data-driven design, modeling, optimization, and decision making problems in complex systems.  

The Best Student Paper Competition and the Best Referred Paper Competition have generated significant interests in QSR community. Most of the papers in the competition were eventually published in top-tier journals in our field. Many awardees and finalists come from or finally joined reputable academic programs in engineering, statistics, and business schools, including Harvard University, University of Wisconsin at Madison, Georgia Tech, Purdue, Rutgers, Iowa, Arizona State, Washington, Michigan, to name a few. The Student Introduction&Interaction Session, jointly with the Best Student Poster Competition, has become a featured session of QSR, and was even highlighted by INFORMS at the annual meeting.  

QSR has been organizing a number of journal sponsored paper sessions as well as journal special issues. The journals include Technometrics, IIE Transactions, Journal of Quality Technology, IEEE Transactions on Automation Science & Engineering, Quality Engineering, and Quality & Reliability Engineering International (QREI). The presentations brought in by these selected high-quality papers have greatly enhanced the knowledge-sharing experience of our members at the meeting.  

QSR has a very visionary advisory board of senior individuals, including (current & former) journal editors, National Academy members, Elected ISI members, ASA/ASQ Fellows, INFORMS Fellows, IIE Fellows. Five senior members from outside U.S. also sit on the board, which is reflection of the diversity of the community. These leaders in the community contributed significantly to the development and growth of QSR section by providing timely guidelines on the initiative and activities and nurturing the junior researchers in the QSR field. 

With the joint efforts of all, QSR will continue to be the warm home to all members, and devote itself to the growth of all members.  



Kamran Paynabar

INFORMS QSR Chair 2018

Fouts Family Early Career Professor and Assistant Professor

H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering

Georgia Tech