Quantification of margins and uncertainties: Conceptual and computational basis

Jon C. Helton

Reliability Engineering and System Safety, 2011, vol. 96, issue 9, 976-1013

Abstract: In 2001, the National Nuclear Security Administration of the U.S. Department of Energy in conjunction with the national security laboratories (i.e., Los Alamos National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories) initiated development of a process designated Quantification of Margins and Uncertainties (QMU) for the use of risk assessment methodologies in the certification of the reliability and safety of the nation's nuclear weapons stockpile. This presentation discusses and illustrates the conceptual and computational basis of QMU in analyses that use computational models to predict the behavior of complex systems. The following topics are considered: (i) the role of aleatory and epistemic uncertainty in QMU, (ii) the representation of uncertainty with probability, (iii) the probabilistic representation of uncertainty in QMU analyses involving only epistemic uncertainty, and (iv) the probabilistic representation of uncertainty in QMU analyses involving aleatory and epistemic uncertainty.

Keywords: Aleatory uncertainty; Epistemic uncertainty; Performance assessment; Quantification of margins and uncertainties; Risk assessment; Sensitivity analysis; Uncertainty analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (22)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:reensy:v:96:y:2011:i:9:p:976-1013

DOI: 10.1016/j.ress.2011.03.017

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