Probabilistic Safety Assessment

Probabilistic safety/risk assessment provides a quantitative framework to estimate risk and identify risk contributors. This chapter introduces the concept of risk and gives an overview of probabilistic safety assessment steps. Special emphasis is given to event tree analysis, importance measures, common cause failure analysis, and human reliability analysis, which are essential and important elements of any safety assessment. Several examples are given to supplement the understanding of these approaches. Some of the remaining important analysis approaches such as fault tree analysis and uncertainty analysis are already covered in rest of the book.