Normal accidents. Living with high-risk technologies

/pdf/the-black-swan-the-impact-of-the-highly-improbable-578rzpihbf.pdf

The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

Risk assessment and risk management: Review of recent advances on their foundation

https://hal-supelec.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00610053/document

Reliability engineering: Old problems and new challenges

Methods and models in process safety and risk management: Past, present and future

Towards an understanding of information needed when planning offshore activities

TheBORAprojecthasdevelopedamodelbasedontheuseofEventTrees,FaultTrees,Influence Diagrams, Risk Influencing Factors (RIFs) and simplified modelling of dependencies between RIFs.The model has been outlined in several earlier papers. Some case studies have been performed in the project.The experience from these case studies has been used in order to develop a generalised methodology for analysis of operational barriers that are intended to prevent hydrocarbon leaks.A stepwise description of this generalised methodology is presented and discussed in the paper.

http://preventor.no/u/ESREL2007-Vinnem-et-al.pdf

Generalised methodology for operational risk analysis

Norwegian national ship risk model

Inappropriate decisions are often regarded as causes of major accidents in the process industries. To improve the quality of decisions, it is important to make the right information available at the right time. The objective of this work is to investigate what types of risk information is needed for risk-related decisions in various decision-making processes. A framework is proposed to facilitate future research for easing information deficiency. In this paper, risk information is examined through common decision-making processes, and is identified serving to 1) detect and characterize risk-related decision problems, 2) indicate the severity and urgency of decisions, 3) state requirements and constraints of workable solutions, 4) represent attributes for comparing and evaluating solutions, and 5) act as rules to maintain safety or control risk. These usages of risk information in different decision problems imply the large diversity in information needs for decision-making. An adaptive information support is thus suggested to provide targeted risk information to specific decision-makers for effective and efficient decision-making in accident prevention in the process industries.

Risk information in decision-making: definitions, requirements and various functions

This paper takes a fresh look at alternative perspectives on major accident causation theories to highlight the fact that these perspectives can supplement and improve the energy barrier perspective. The paper starts from a literature study of energy barrier perspective, Man-Made Disaster theory (MMD), Conflicting Objective Perspective (COP), Normal Accident Theory (NAT), High Reliability Organization theory (HRO), Resilience Engineering (RE), and System-Theoretic Accident Model and Processes (STAMP) model to find out main concepts and identify critical factors. A further study of safety barrier perspective is carried out using STAMP methodology to understand how barrier functions can fail. It was found that alternative perspectives can supplement the barrier perspective by structurally analyzing possible failure causes for barrier function (STAMP, MMD), looking for driving forces for unsafe decisions and unsafe actions when human interacts or be part of barrier systems (COP, HRO), and emphasizing possible complex interactions and tight coupling within barrier functions (NAT, RE). Furthermore, suggestions to barrier management based on best practices from these perspectives are presented, which will be developed into concrete risk reduction measures, such as checklists, audits schemes, or indicators to help decision-makers better comprehend and maintain the performance of barrier functions in further work.

Stein Haugen

Papers

Towards an understanding of information needed when planning offshore activities

Generalised methodology for operational risk analysis

Norwegian national ship risk model

Risk information in decision-making: definitions, requirements and various functions

A Fresh Look at Barriers from Alternative Perspectives on Risk