Recent Advances in Risk Assessment of Engineered Facilities

Authors

Michael H. Faber

Abstract

Over the last 3-4 decades methods of structural reliability and risk based decision making have found their way in to several engineering fields such as civil engineering, offshore engineering and maritime engineering. Substantial achievements have been reached for what concerns the development of basic theoretical foundation and tools for probabilistic analysis. This has facilitated that a series of important traditional engineering problems have been solved with increased efficiency and also contributed to the solution of new engineering challenges. The research field, however, is still in many ways a young one, and there are still many challenges that need to be addressed. These include fundamental questions, such as how to account for
sustainability and how to deal with complex systems or systems which are hardly understood. The present paper starts out by presenting recent research results on the issue of engineering decision making in the context of society. A framework for engineering decision making developed by the Joint Committee on Structural Safety (JCSS) is outlined in which emphasis is given to defining the context of decision making. One of the central aspects of this framework is a new proposal for the representation of "systems" which facilitates a generic approach to risk assessments. The proposed representation introduces a characterization of vulnerability as well as robustness, both for non-structural and structural systems. Finally, the difficult but
crucial issue of risk criteria is taken up and recent results on interrelation between optimality and safety are presented. The engineering treatment of the different components of the developed framework is outlined throughout the paper by illustrative examples taken from various practical applications of the framework and references are given to where more details may be found.

Published in/by

Proceedings CERUP, International Conference "Risk Management in Production Activities", Porto, Portugal, October 10-12, 2007.