Reliability Data Collection And Use In Risk And Availability Assessment

Reliability data collection and its use in risk and availability assessment is a subject of increasing importance. The founders of EuReDatA, and in particular, Arne Ullman, the originator 'and first Chairman of the Association, recognised the need for a body capable of acting as a catalyst and providing a unified approach to this subject. It is therefore a prevailing objective of the European Reliability Databank Association to initiate and support contact between experts, companies and institutions active in reliability engineering and research. Although the first and principle interest of EuReDatA is reliability data and data banks, the Association is aware that these are tools that are used with others to establish and maintain reliability and safety. It is with this objective that EuReDatA regularly holds conferences and seminars covering a range of reliability topics. C.A. Campbell H.J. Wingender EuReDatA Chairman Organiser, Editor Contents CHAPTER 1: OVERVIEWS Data Situation and the Quality of Risk Assessment (FRG) A. Birkhofer, K. Koberlein (GRS) ..••••....•.•...••.....•.•.. 3 Reliability Engineering in Europe (CEC) G. Volta (JRC-Ispra) •...••••... •...........•••.•....•.••..••. 16 1984: A Year of Industrial Catastrophies.

International cooperation on reliability and accident data collection and processing, exchange of experience on actual uses of data and reliability engineering techniques is a major step in realising safer and more efficient industrial systems. This book provides an updated presentation of the activities in this field on a worldwide basis.

The ever increasing public demand and the setting-up of national and international legislation on safety assessment of potentially dangerous plants require that a correspondingly increased effort be devoted by regulatory bodies and industrial organisations to collect reliability data in order to produce safety analyses. Reliability data are also needed to assess availability of plants and services and to improve quality of production processes, in particular, to meet the needs of plant operators and/or designers regarding maintenance planning, production availability, etc. The need for an educational effort in the field of data acquisition and processing has been stressed within the framework of EuReDatA, an association of organisations operating reliability data banks. This association aims to promote data exchange and pooling of data between organisations and to encourage the adoption of compatible standards and basic definitions for a consistent exchange of reliability data. Such basic definitions are considered to be essential in order to improve data quality. To cover issues directly linked to the above areas ample space is devoted to the definition of failure events, common cause and human error data, feedback of operational and disturbance data, event data analysis, lifetime distributions, cumulative distribution functions, density functions, Bayesian inference methods, multivariate analysis, fuzzy sets and possibility theory, etc.

The assessment and management of risk to society from the operation of chemical process plants and other industrial activities in which dangerous substances are produced, used, handled or stored will remain a topic of great importance in the next decade. In order to evaluate this specific risk on a qualitative and/or quantitative basis, the concepts of risk analyses are linked together in this book. The "performance based" and "goal oriented" regulatory requirements of the European Council's new "Seveso II Directive" for the identification of large scale industrial hazards, prevention of sudden and uncontrolled releases of dangerous substances from industrial plants and mitigation of serious consequences of industrial accidents to people and the environment are examined. The fact that risk assessment and management are key elements to such forms of regulation is also demonstrated. While the "Seveso II Directive" defines "what" has to be achieved on the control of major hazards involving dangerous substances within the European Union, the methods of risk assessment and management give guidance on "how" to achieve it. The text provides a practical guide for decision-makers in regulatory bodies and companies with a non-technical background. Scientists and engineers who are not yet familiar with the concepts of risk assessment and who want a survey of some fundamentals of, and principal results from, risk assessment studies and approaches primarily for applications in the context defined by the "Seveso Directives" will also find this book invaluable.

Reliability-based design is relatively well established in structural design. Its use is less mature in geotechnical design, but there is a steady progression towards reliability-based design as seen in the inclusion of a new Annex D on "Reliability of Geotechnical Structures" in the third edition of ISO 2394. Reliability-based design can be viewed as a simplified form of risk-based design where different consequences of failure are implicitly covered by the adoption of different target reliability indices. Explicit risk management methodologies are required for large geotechnical systems where soil and loading conditions are too varied to be conveniently slotted into a few reliability classes (typically three) and an associated simple discrete tier of target reliability indices.