Comparison of safety factor approach and the risk-based approach

Abstract

Safety is at the Centre of most human endeavor. The safer a system, process, technology, or service is the easier and faster it gets embraced by the people. In order to ensure the safety of people, environment and the asset of stakeholders, different experts have adopted various approaches or measures which will reduce risk and maintain high safety level.

The aim of this thesis is to compare two of these approaches, the so-called safety factor approach and the risk-based approach, and also to present and discuss some integrated approaches in which the safety factor and risk-based approach are combined.

There are many advantages of using the safety factor and/or the risk-based approach in engineering design and many researchers have tried to combine both approaches with a view to harnessing the benefits inherent in using the approaches separately. These different measures which have been used by some experts to combine the benefit of the two approaches will be discussed but the detailed discussion with applications and computations will be subject for future work. The basic idea behind the integration of the approaches will be presented with simple example and recommendation will be given on which approach to adopt.