Part III
Practical Applications
In this third part of the book, we present some practical applications of the methods introduced in Part II for the representation and propagation of uncertainty in risk assessment. The applications range from the reliability, availability, and maintainability (RAM) analysis of single components to system risk assessment in terms of characterizing uncertainty related to frequentist probabilities of occurrence of undesirable events and of their consequences.
Specifically, Chapters 8 and 9 present applications regarding quantification of the reliability of a structure and the availability of a maintained industrial item, respectively. Chapter 10 focuses on the event tree analysis of a complex multi-component engineering system and Chapter 11 presents an analysis of the consequences of undesirable events associated with the operation of an industrial system. Finally, Chapter 12 concerns the probabilitistic risk assessment of a process plant.
All the applications presented involve assessments in circumstances characterized by poor knowledge of one or more uncertain quantities. In the applications of Chapters 8–11, the assessments are first performed using a non-probabilistic method of uncertainty representation and propagation. Then, the results are transformed into probability distributions for comparison to the outcomes of a purely probabilistic uncertainty propagation treatment. The application in Chapter 12 uses a fully Bayesian approach to represent ...
