The technological age has seen a number of catastrophic and preventable failures -- from buildings and bridges to space and launch vehicles, from chemical factories to nuclear power plants, from ships to airplanes, and from trains to automobiles. Often the root cause can be traced to design and engineering that did not appropriately consider safety as a factor. The ideas, methods, and case studies of this book are at the nexus of probabilistic risk assessment and decision analysis. This book melds these two technologies into a method of incorporating safety into a system or product from the beginning of its development.
Choosing Safety is the first book to bring together probabilistic risk assessment and decision analysis using real case studies. By virtue of more than a dozen practical examples from the author's experience in nuclear power, aerospace, and other potentially hazardous industries, the book focuses on methods for making logical decisions about complex engineered systems and products in which safety is a key factor in design -- and where failure can cause great harm, injury, or death. In a nutshell, it shows when, where, and how probabilistic risk assessment fits into decision analysis. This book provides the needed guidance and formal procedures to include safety in project decisions.
