Probabilistic Risk Assessment (Paperback)

High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles Probabilistic risk assessment (PRA) (or probabilistic safety assessment/analysis) is a systematic and comprehensive methodology to evaluate risks associated with a complex engineered technological entity (such as an airliner or a nuclear power plant). Risk in a PRA is defined as a feasible detrimental outcome of an activity or action. Consequences are expressed numerically (e.g., the number of people potentially hurt or killed) and their likelihoods of occurrence are expressed as probabilities or frequencies (i.e., the number of occurrences or the probability of occurrence per unit time). The total risk is the expected loss: the sum of the products of the consequences multiplied by their probabilities. The spectrum of risks across classes of events are also of concern, and are usually controlled in licensing processes - it would be of concern if rare but high consequence events were found to dominate the overall risk, particularly as these risk assessment is very sensitive to assumptions (how rare is a high consequence event?).