Implications to Engineers
Engineers must weigh chances of defect causing injury against cost of minimizing…
Examples of Improved Safety
Magnetic door catch introduced on refrigerators Prevent death by asphyxiation of…
Difficulties in establishing Safeguards
Incomplete knowledge of the engineering subject Refusal to face hard questions…
Accounting publicly for benefits and risks
Engineers should account publicly for benefits and risks in the following manner:…
Public Risk and Public Acceptance
Risks and benefits to public are more easily determined than to individuals…
Difficulties in assessing Personal Risks
• Individuals are ready to assume voluntary risks than involuntary risks. • The difficulty here is generally in assessing personal risks which are involuntary. • The problem of quantification of risk raises innumerable problems. • For example, how to assign a rupee value to one’s life. There is no over the counter trade in lives. • Even for a sale, it has to be clear under what conditions the sale is to take place. • If one buys a kg of rice it matters whether it is just one additional purchase one makes Regularly or it is the first rice purchase after quite sometime. • Even when compensations are made to people exposed to involuntary risk, the basis on which it is made or even the intensity of risk could be different for different people. • As of now, the one suggestion could be to employ an open procedure, overseen b y trained arbiters, in each case, where risk to individuals is to be studied and remedied.
Conceptual difficulties in Risk-Benefit Analysis
Both risks and benefits lie in future heavy discounting of future because…
Failure modes and effect analysis (FMEA)
This approach systematically examines the failure modes of each component, without however, focusing on relationships among the elements of a complex system. Fault Tree Analysis (FTA) A system failure is proposed and then events are traced back to possible causes at the component level. The reverse of the fault-tree analysis is ‘event – tree analysis’. This method most effectively illustrates the disciplined approach required to capture as much as possible of everything that affects proper functioning and safety of a complex system.
