Risk Assessment: Tools, Techniques, and Their Applications

15.1 Description

Risk assessment has been a tool/technique used by humanity for much of recorded history. Whether to fight or flee in situations where survival is at stake, and the decision to run or engage the threat in many cases would involve some assessment as to whether or not the struggle would be winnable. In “History of the Peloponnesian War,” Thucydides attributes the Greek general Pericle with stating that the advantage the Athenian army had was their ability to predetermine risk and consequences prior to engaging an enemy. In recent years, with the significant advances in technology, the need to provide decision makers with tools to define risk and minimize the consequences of undesirable events, equipment, and human failure, new tools have been required to make these decisions. Probabilistic risk assessment (PRA) is one of these tools.

Used initially by the aviation and nuclear power industry, its use has been incorporated by environmental regulators and industry in making cleanup decisions, in computer security analysis, and in industry as a decision-making tool for increasing safety during all aspects of design, operations, and upkeep of facilities. It also provides an analysis to make cost saving decisions by demonstrating where efforts should be exerted to gain the most benefit or where to avoid the expenditure of large amounts of time and financial resources pursuing efforts of little or no practical gain (1).