Hazard engineering and the management of risk

Discusses the nature of the uncertainty inherent in engineering projects by considering four types of problem, together with the form and development of engineering failures, and introduces hazard management as a possible tool for use in the control of risk. Hazard engineering is concerned with the identification and treatment of exceptional circumstances where the hazards need to be controlled using specialist skills. The proneness to failure of a project is assessed by means of a hazard audit which compares the current state with knowledge from previous failures. Hazard management describes the set of actions used to increase the distance between the current state and an adjacent limit state surface. Limit states may be expressed in qualitative rather than quantitative terms, and the axes of the failure hyperspace may be ordinal or nominal. An interval probability representation of uncertainty permits the inclusion of true, false, unknown and contradictory knowledge