Modeling judgment uncertainty in inspection of industrial facilities

A major goal of a reliability and safety analysis is to bring system hazards to acceptable levels by controlling the probability of failure and the potential human, economic, and environmental losses. Some typical policies used to minimize hazards and risk include: (1) redundancy, (2) inspection and maintenance, (3) protective systems, etc. Based on this criteria, a risk-based inspection methodology was developed for ranking failure modes, elements, sub-systems and consequences for industrial facilities for inspection purposes. Two approaches were considered in this analysis: single point estimate of risk; and interval estimate of risk. Several examples were used to illustrate the suggested methodology where, single as will as multiple failure modes for components were considered for ranking purposes