A min cut-set-wise truncation procedure for importance measures computation in probabilistic safety assessment

Nicolas Duflot, Bérenguer, Christophe, Laurence Dieulle and Dominique Vasseur

Reliability Engineering and System Safety, 2009, vol. 94, issue 11, 1827-1837

Abstract: A truncation process aims to determine among the set of minimal cut-sets (MCS) produced by a probabilistic safety assessment (PSA) model which of them are significant. Several truncation processes have been proposed for the evaluation of the probability of core damage ensuring a fixed accuracy level. However, the evaluation of new risk indicators as importance measures requires to re-examine the truncation process in order to ensure that the produced estimates will be accurate enough. In this paper a new truncation process is developed permitting to estimate from a single set of MCS the importance measure of any basic event with the desired accuracy level. The main contribution of this new method is to propose an MCS-wise truncation criterion involving two thresholds: an absolute threshold in addition to a new relative threshold concerning the potential probability of the MCS of interest. The method has been tested on a complete level 1 PSA model of a 900MWe NPP developed by “Electricité de France†(EDF) and the results presented in this paper indicate that to reach the same accuracy level the proposed method produces a set of MCS whose size is significantly reduced.

Keywords: Probabilistic safety assessment; Truncation; Importance measures; Uncertainty; Risk-informed decision making (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:reensy:v:94:y:2009:i:11:p:1827-1837

DOI: 10.1016/j.ress.2009.05.015

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