A critical view of severity classification in risk assessment methods

The knowledge of operational experts plays a fundamental role in performing safety assessments in safety critical organizations. The complexity and socio-technical nature of such systems produce hazardous situations which require a thorough understanding of concrete operational scenarios and cannot be anticipated by simply analysing single failures of specific functions. This paper addresses some limitations regarding state-of-the-art safety assessment techniques, with special reference to the adoption of “chain of event” models in accident causation (widely criticised by many authors), to the use of severity classes and to the adoption of the worst credible effect criterion. Such methods tend to assume a linear link between single hazards considered in isolation and corresponding consequences for safety, thus neglecting the intrinsic complexity of the systems under analysis and reducing the opportunities for an effective involvement of operational experts. An alternative approach is proposed to overcome these limitations, by distinguishing different typologies of hazards and integrating the analysis of single functions with the study of concrete operational scenarios.