Risk Assessment

Risk Assessment refers to the quantitative or qualitative determination of risk associated to a system in a well-defined situation and/or a known threat (called a “hazard”). The hazard may arise from a dangerous action required to be carried out on the system itself, from the effect of a failure, or from a working condition not covered by any safety design action. The safety design actions can refer to safety technical measures (protections, safety devices of the system, individual safety devices) or to actions of a procedural nature (training of the personnel, description of how to operate correctly a specific dangerous activity).

A quantitative risk assessment requires the determination of two components of risk: the severity of a potential loss (called “severity or magnitude“) and the probability of that loss occurring.

During the design of complex systems, risk assessments performed by experts in reliability engineering and safety engineering can avert hazards on the system that could endanger human life, health, the environment, and the proper functioning of the system.

Most common techniques of Hazard Analysis on machines plants and systems are: