Risk Assessment and Accident Investigation

Incident investigation is both a useful input into a risk assessment and a consumer of risk assessment results. In the former, learnings from the incident are almost always relevant to other portions of other pipelines. In the latter, especially when responsibility (blame) is to be assigned, what should have been known, via risk assessment, prior […]

Intelligent simplifications

The challenge when constructing a risk assessment model is to fully understand the mechanisms at work and then to identify the optimum number of detailed variables for the model’s intended use. This follows the reductionist approach previously discussed—breaking the problem down into pieces for later reassembly into meaningful risk estimates. We must understand and embrace […]

Risk assessment should not add complexity!

In any modeling effort, complexity should exist only because the underlying real-world phenomenon is complex. The risk assessment should not add complexity. Ironically, a scoring type risk assessment, intended to simplify the modeling of real-world phenomena, actually adds complexity. By converting real-world phenomena into ‘points’ via an assignment protocol, an artificial layer of complexity has […]

What’s wrong with my current scoring, indexing approach?

Some of the more significant compromises arising from the use of the simple scoring type assessments included: Without an anchor to absolute risk estimates, the assessment results were useful only in a rather small analysis space. The results offered little information regarding risk-related costs or appropriate responses to certain risk levels. Results expressed in relative […]

How to do modern pipeline risk assessment?

Pipeline Risk Management Chapter 1 highlights 1.1 Risk assessment at-a-glance 1.2 Risk: Theory and application 1.2.1 The Need for Formality 1.2.2 Complexity 1.2.3 Intelligent Simplification 1.2.4 Classical QRA versus Physics-based Models 1.2.5 Statistical Modeling 1.3 The Risk Assessment Process 1.3.1 Fix the Obvious 1.3.2 Using this Manual 1.3.3 Quickly getting answers 1.4 Pipeline Risk Assessment: […]