Incorporating organizational factors into probabilistic safety assessment of nuclear power plants through canonical probabilistic models

Galán, S.F., A. Mosleh and J.M. Izquierdo

Reliability Engineering and System Safety, 2007, vol. 92, issue 8, 1131-1138

Abstract: The ω-factor approach is a method that explicitly incorporates organizational factors into Probabilistic safety assessment of nuclear power plants. Bayesian networks (BNs) are the underlying formalism used in this approach. They have a structural part formed by a graph whose nodes represent organizational variables, and a parametric part that consists of conditional probabilities, each of them quantifying organizational influences between one variable and its parents in the graph. The aim of this paper is twofold. First, we discuss some important limitations of current procedures in the ω-factor approach for either assessing conditional probabilities from experts or estimating them from data. We illustrate the discussion with an example that uses data from Licensee Events Reports of nuclear power plants for the estimation task. Second, we introduce significant improvements in the way BNs for the ω-factor approach can be constructed, so that parameter acquisition becomes easier and more intuitive. The improvements are based on the use of noisy-OR gates as model of multicausal interaction between each BN node and its parents.

Keywords: Probabilistic safety assessment; Organizational factors; ω-factor approach; Bayesian networks; Canonical probabilistic models (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2007
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:reensy:v:92:y:2007:i:8:p:1131-1138

DOI: 10.1016/j.ress.2006.07.006

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