0000000000627098
AUTHOR
G. Curcurù
A dempster-shafer theory-based approach to compute the birnbaum importance measure under epistemic uncertainty
Importance Measures (IMs) aim at quantifying the contribution of components to the system performance. In Process Risk Assessment (PRA), they are commonly used by risk managers to derive information about the risk/safety significance of events. However, IMs are typically calculated without taking into account the uncertainty that inevitably occurs whenever the input reliability data are poor. In literature, uncertainty arising from the lack of knowledge on the system/process parameters is defined as epistemic or subjective uncertainty. The present work aims at investigating on its influence on the Birnbaum IM and on how such an uncertainty could be accounted for in the components ranking. I…
A bottom-up procedure to calculate the Top Event probability in presence of epistemic uncertainty
Industrial plants may be subjected to very dangerous events. Different methodologies are employed to evaluate the probability of their occurrence, as Process Safety Analysis (PSA) or Risk Analysis (RA). However, since for rare events reliability data are poor, the epistemic uncertainty needs to be considered. In this context, the classical probabilistic approach cannot be successfully used and then different approaches must be taken into account. Actually, this paper proposes the use of the Evidence Theory or Dempster-Shafer Theory (DST) to deal with data characterizing rare events in high risk industrial sites. In particular, a classical Fault Tree Analysis (FTA) is considered when the onl…