The technological age has seen catastrophic and preventable failures from buildings and bridges to space and launch vehicles, from chemical factories to nuclear power plants, from ships to airplanes, and from trains to automobiles. Often the root cause can be traced to decisions that did not appropriately consider safety as a factor in design and engineering. Choosing Safety is the first book to bring together probabilistic risk assessment and decision analysis using real case studies. The book combines these two technologies into a method of building safety into a system or product from the very beginning of its development. By virtue of more than a dozen practical examples from the author s experience in nuclear power, aerospace, and other potentially hazardous facilities, the book focuses on processes for making logical decisions about complex engineered systems and products in which safety is a key factor in design and where failure can cause great harm, injury, or death.
Choosing Safety is for managers, project leaders, engineers, and scientists who create, design, develop, operate or maintain high consequence, complex systems and products. The book is also for students and anyone else interested in a broad perspective about the union of decision analysis and probabilistic risk assessment.
