A New Approach to Construct Optimal Bow Tie Diagrams for Risk Analysis

Bow tie diagrams have become popular methods in risk analysis and safety management. This tool describes graphically, in the same scheme, the whole scenario of an identified risk and its respective preventive and protective barriers. The major problem with bow tie diagrams is that they remain limited by their technical level and by their restriction to the graphical representation of different scenarios without any consideration to the dynamic aspect of real systems. This paper overcomes this weakness by proposing a new Bayesian approach to construct bow ties from real data.