Piero Baraldi

Explores methods for the representation and treatment of uncertainty in risk assessment In providing guidance for practical decision-making situations concerning high-consequence technologies (e.g., nuclear, oil and gas, transport, etc.), the theories and methods studied in Uncertainty in Risk Assessment have wide-ranging applications from engineering and medicine to environmental impacts and natural disasters, security, and financial risk management. The main focus, however, is on engineering applications. While requiring some fundamental background in risk assessment, as well as a basic knowledge of probability theory and statistics, Uncertainty in Risk Assessment can be read profitably by a broad audience of professionals in the field, including researchers and graduate students on courses within risk analysis, statistics, engineering, and the physical sciences. Uncertainty in Risk Assessment: Illustrates the need for seeing beyond probability to represent uncertainties in risk assessment contexts.Provides simple explanations (supported by straightforward numerical examples) of the meaning of different types of probabilities, including interval probabilities, and the fundamentals of possibility theory and evidence theory.Offers guidance on when to use probability and when to use an alternative representation of uncertainty.Presents and discusses methods for the representation and characterization of uncertainty in risk assessment.Uses examples to clearly illustrate ideas and concepts.

Reliability and safety are fundamental attributes of any modern technological system. To achieve this, diverse types of protection barriers are placed as safeguards from the hazard posed by the operation of the system, within a multiple-barrier design concept. These barriers are intended to protect the system from failures of any of its elements, hardware, software, human and organizational.Correspondingly, the quantification of the probability of failure of the system and its protective barriers, through reliability and risk analyses, becomes a primary task in both the system design and operation phases.This exercise book serves as a complementary tool supporting the methodology concepts introduced in the books ';An introduction to the basics of reliability and risk analysis'; and ';Computational methods for reliability and risk analysis'; by Enrico Zio, in that it gives an opportunity to familiarize with the applications of classical and advanced techniques of reliability and risk analysis.