A limitation that continues to plague older risk assessment methodologies is the inability to fully include the results of inspections. None dispute the value of inspection and its critical role in failure avoidance. Yet, neither the classical statistics-centric QRA nor the common relative risk ranking methodologies, can capture inspection activity in a meaningful way.
A modern risk assessment methodology should recognize exactly what has been learned from an inspection and how that knowledge should be captured. The age of each inspection and its detection/sizing capabilities are crucial, as are the inspection findings themselves.
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