• Journal of Applied Reliability
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• v.10 no.1
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• pp.73-91
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• 2010

All activities relate to railway traffic involve risk and that these arise from a combination of the nature of operating activities. Proper management system is required to provide the organizational capability to reveal, analyse and address these weaknesses over time and in reasonably practicable ways, which will determine the rate at which risks can be further reduced. This paper presents a systematic risk analysis approach to safety planning and decision making, informed by a range of risk assessment techniques. An railway organization's safety management system is also presented that shows the approaches taken to minimize the external risks, and identify the shared risks and explain how they will be controlled through collaboration with others.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.47 no.3
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• pp.362-379
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• 2015

In this study, Nuclear Power Plant (NPP) construction schedule delay risk assessment methodology is developed and the construction delay risk is assessed for turnkey international NPP projects. Three levels of delay factors were selected through literature review and discussions with nuclear industry experts. A questionnaire survey was conducted on the basis of an analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and Relative Importance Index (RII) methods and the schedule delay risk is assessed qualitatively and quantitatively by severity and frequency of occurrence of delay factors. This study assigns four main delay factors to the first level: main contractor, utility, regulatory authority, and financial and country factor. The second and the third levels are designed with 12 sub-factors and 32 sub-sub-factors, respectively. This study finds the top five most important sub-sub-factors, which are as follows: policy changes, political instability and public intervention; uncompromising regulatory criteria and licensing documents conflicting with existing regulations; robust design document review procedures; redesign due to errors in design and design changes; and worldwide shortage of qualified and experienced nuclear specific equipment manufacturers. The proposed combined AHP-RII methodology is capable of assessing delay risk effectively and efficiently. Decision makers can apply risk informed decision making to avoid unexpected construction delays of NPPs.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.46 no.4
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• pp.541-546
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• 2014

Probabilistic Safety Assessment (PSA) has been widely used to estimate the overall safety of nuclear power plants (NPP) and it provides base information for risk informed application (RIA) and risk informed regulation (RIR). For the effective and correct use of PSA in RIA/RIR related decision making, the risk estimated by a PSA model should be as realistic as possible. In this work, a best-estimate thermal-hydraulic analysis of loss-of-coolant accidents (LOCAs) for the Hanul Nuclear Units 3&4 is first carried out in a systematic way. That is, the behaviors of peak cladding temperature (PCT) were analyzed with various combinations of break sizes, the operating conditions of safety systems, and the operator's action time for aggressive secondary cooling. Thereafter, the results of the thermal-hydraulic analysis have been reflected in the improvement of the PSA model by changing both accident sequences and success criteria of the event trees for the LOCA scenarios.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.76 no.2
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• pp.193-205
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• 2020

The growing need for assuring efficient and sustainable investments in civil engineering structures has determined a renovated interest in the rational design of such structures from designers, clients and authorities. As a result, risk-informed decision-making methodologies are increasingly being used as a direct decision tool or as an upper-level layer from which performance-based approaches are then calibrated against. One of the most important and challenging aspects of today's structural design is to adequately handle the system-level effects, the known unknowns and the unknown unknowns. These aspects revolve around assessing and evaluating relevant damage scenarios, namely those involving unacceptable/intolerable damage levels. Hence, the importance of risk analysis of disproportionate collapse, and along with it of robustness. However, the way robustness has been used in modern design codes varies substantially, from simple provisions of prescriptive rules to complex risk analysis of the disproportionate collapse. As a result, implementing design for robustness is still very much a grey area and more so when it comes to defining means to quantify robustness. This paper revisits the most common robustness frameworks, highlighting their merits and limitations, and identifies one among them which is very promising as a way forward to solve the still open challenges.

• Journal of the Society of Naval Architects of Korea
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• v.55 no.2
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• pp.93-102
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• 2018

Quantitative Risk Assessment (QRA) has been used in shipping and offshore industries for many years, supporting the decision-making process to guarantee safe running at different stages of design, fabrication and throughout service life. The assessments of a risk perspective are informed by the frequency of events (probability) and the associated consequences. As the number of offshore platforms increases, so does the length of subsea pipelines, thus there is a need to extend this approach and enable the subsea industry to place more emphasis on uncertainties. On-board operations can lead to objects being dropped on subsea pipelines, which can cause leaks and other pipeline damage. This study explains how to conduct hit frequency analyses of subsea pipelines, using historical data, and how to obtain a finite number of scenarios for the consequences analysis. An example study using probabilistic methods is used.

• Korean Journal of Biological Psychiatry
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• v.19 no.4
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• pp.153-158
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• 2012

Understanding of a clinical trial is essential in developing clinical guideline and adopting evidence based practice. In designing and executing clinical trials, following ethical requirements should be considered : social value, scientific validity, fair subject selection, informed consent, favorable risk-benefit ratio, institutional review board, and respect for human subjects. According to the stage of drug development, purpose of trials, accumulated scientific data, clinical trials for drug development are classified as phase 1, 2, 3, and 4. Phases of clinical trials can be overlapped and the judgment of entering into the next phase should be considered highly strategically. In reading, evaluating and interpreting clinical trial reports, various skills and challenges exist. Patient sample composition, trial duration, selection of endpoints, responders and non-responders, placebo effect, patient recruitment, and extrapolation to the real world are the examples of those challenges. Treatment success will come from the well balanced approach of evidence based decision making and consideration of specific single case.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.56 no.2
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• pp.644-654
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• 2024

After the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami (Japan, 2011), regulatory efforts to mitigate external hazards have increased both the safety requirements and the total capital cost of nuclear power plants (NPPs). In these circumstances, identifying not only disaster robustness but also cost-effective capacity setting of NPPs has become one of the most important tasks for the nuclear power industry. A few studies have been performed to relocate the seismic capacity of NPPs, yet the effects of multiple hazards have not been accounted for in NPP capacity optimization. The major challenges in extending this problem to the multihazard dimension are (1) the high computational costs for both multihazard risk quantification and system-level optimization and (2) the lack of capital cost databases of NPPs. To resolve these issues, this paper proposes an effective method that identifies the optimal multihazard capacity of NPPs using a multi-objective genetic algorithm and the two-stage direct quantification of fault trees using Monte Carlo simulation method, called the two-stage DQFM. Also, a capacity-based indirect capital cost measure is proposed. Such a proposed method enables NPP to achieve safety and cost-effectiveness against multi-hazard simultaneously within the computationally efficient platform. The proposed multihazard capacity optimization framework is demonstrated and tested with an earthquake-tsunami example.

• Journal of the Computational Structural Engineering Institute of Korea
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• v.36 no.4
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• pp.273-282
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• 2023

Probabilistic safety assessment (PSA) has been widely used to evaluate the seismic risk of nuclear power plants (NPPs). However, studies on seismic PSA for process plants, such as gas plants, oil refineries, and chemical plants, have been scarce. This is because the major disasters to which these process plants are vulnerable include explosions, fires, and release (or dispersion) of toxic chemicals. However, seismic PSA is essential for the plants located in regions with significant earthquake risks. Seismic PSA entails probabilistic seismic hazard analysis (PSHA), event tree analysis (ETA), fault tree analysis (FTA), and fragility analysis for the structures and essential equipment items. Among those analyses, ETA can depict the accident sequence for core damage, which is the worst disaster and top event concerning NPPs. However, there is no general top event with regard to process plants. Therefore, PSA cannot be directly applied to process plants. Moreover, there is a paucity of studies on developing fragility curves for various equipment. This paper introduces PSA for gas plants based on FTA, which is then transformed into Bayesian network, that is, a probabilistic graph model that can aid risk-informed decision-making. Finally, the proposed method is applied to a gas plant, and several decision-making cases are demonstrated.

• Journal of Genetic Medicine
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• v.8 no.2
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• pp.100-104
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• 2011

Genetic testing has been generalized for the diagnosis of diseases and is an important method of research with advances in the life sciences. In particular, we should give better attention to the genetic test for a fetus. Because the fetus has no autonomy, ethical and social issues can arise. Therefore, appropriate genetic counseling is needed for parents to be informed with the characteristics, natural progress, and possible treatment of a genetic disease, prior to the prenatal genetic test. Physicians should also inform parents how a particular genetic risk factor relates with the likelihood of a disease, in order to assist the parents in making the best decision. Furthermore, the current law for prenatal genetic testing should be approached rationally.

• Journal of Gastric Cancer
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• v.21 no.4
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• pp.368-378
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• 2021

Purpose: When patients with early gastric cancer (EGC) undergo non-curative endoscopic submucosal dissection requiring gastrectomy (NC-ESD-RG), additional medical resources and expenses are required for surgery. To reduce this burden, predictive model for NC-ESD-RG is required. Materials and Methods: Data from 2,997 patients undergoing ESD for 3,127 forceps biopsy-proven differentiated-type EGCs (2,345 and 782 in training and validation sets, respectively) were reviewed. Using the training set, the logistic stepwise regression analysis determined the independent predictors of NC-ESD-RG (NC-ESD other than cases with lateral resection margin involvement or piecemeal resection as the only non-curative factor). Using these predictors, a risk-scoring system for predicting NC-ESD-RG was developed. Performance of the predictive model was examined internally with the validation set. Results: Rate of NC-ESD-RG was 17.3%. Independent pre-ESD predictors for NC-ESD-RG included moderately differentiated or papillary EGC, large tumor size, proximal tumor location, lesion at greater curvature, elevated or depressed morphology, and presence of ulcers. A risk-score was assigned to each predictor of NC-ESD-RG. The area under the receiver operating characteristic curve for predicting NC-ESD-RG was 0.672 in both training and validation sets. A risk-score of 5 points was the optimal cut-off value for predicting NC-ESD-RG, and the overall accuracy was 72.7%. As the total risk score increased, the predicted risk for NC-ESD-RG increased from 3.8% to 72.6%. Conclusions: We developed and validated a risk-scoring system for predicting NC-ESD-RG based on pre-ESD variables. Our risk-scoring system can facilitate informed consent and decision-making for preoperative treatment selection between ESD and surgery in patients with EGC.