Premium
Risk and Uncertainty Analysis in Government Safety Decisions
Author(s) -
PatéCornell Elisabeth
Publication year - 2002
Publication title -
risk analysis
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.972
H-Index - 130
eISSN - 1539-6924
pISSN - 0272-4332
DOI - 10.1111/0272-4332.00043
Subject(s) - risk analysis (engineering) , context (archaeology) , risk management , ranking (information retrieval) , conservatism , risk assessment , actuarial science , probabilistic risk assessment , government (linguistics) , probabilistic logic , uncertainty analysis , decision analysis , computer science , operations research , business , engineering , political science , statistics , computer security , mathematics , geography , linguistics , philosophy , archaeology , finance , machine learning , artificial intelligence , politics , law , simulation
Probabilistic risk analysis (PRA) can be an effective tool to assess risks and uncertainties and to set priorities among safety policy options. Based on systems analysis and Bayesian probability, PRA has been applied to a wide range of cases, three of which are briefly presented here: the maintenance of the tiles of the space shuttle, the management of patient risk in anesthesia, and the choice of seismic provisions of building codes for the San Francisco Bay Area. In the quantification of a risk, a number of problems arise in the public sector where multiple stakeholders are involved. In this article, I describe different approaches to the treatments of uncertainties in risk analysis, their implications for risk ranking, and the role of risk analysis results in the context of a safety decision process. I also discuss the implications of adopting conservative hypotheses before proceeding to what is, in essence, a conditional uncertainty analysis, and I explore some implications of different levels of ``conservatism'' for the ranking of risk mitigation measures.