Effects of System Reliability Improvements on Future Risks

In order to build a model to predict accidents in a complicated man-machine sytem, human errors and mechanical reliability can be viewed as the most important factors. Such factors are explicitly included in a generic model. Another point to keep in mind is that the model should be constructed so that the data in a type of accident can be utilized to predict other types of accidents. Based on such a generic prediction model, we analyze the effects of system reliability. When we improve the system reliability, in other words, when there are changes in model parameters, the predicted time to next accidents should be modified influencing the effects of system reliability improvements. We apply Bayesian approach and finds the formula to explain how a change on the machine reliability or human error probability influences the time to next accident.