The quality assessment of safety analysis: Dissertation

The increasing application of safety and risk analysis makes it necessary to have methods and criteria for evaluating the contents and results of such analyses.The main problems encountered in the applicability of safety analysis are the quality of the analyses and the resources needed for the analyses.Quality systems developed for other industrial purposes offer means for developing quality systems which support the quality management of safety analyses.These issues constitute the subject matter of this investigation.This study developed a new method for assessing the quality of safety analyses.The new method is based on evaluation of the analysis process by means of a checklist.For validating the method, the interassessor reliability was examined by conducting parallel independent assessments of the same safety analysis.The validity of the method by uncovering deficiencies in the safety analysis was examined by using information on critical incidents collected from the analysed activity and descriptions of accidents as the reference.The importance of the observed deficiencies was evaluated by taking the consequences of the incidents as the criteria.The results of the study demonstrated that this new method is capable of revealing deficiencies in a safety analysis.The study also detected some typical problems in safety analysis processes and factors decreasing the quality of analyses.Therefore more detailed recommendations on the content and documentation of safety analysis in different kinds of situations, as well as criteria for assessing the quality of safety analyses, are clearly needed.Several proposals for improving the quality of safety analyses on the basis of the results are presented.These concern, for example, quality management and computer aids in safety analysis and safety information systems.Because time and resources were limited, the results of this investigation and the proposals presented should be considered only as a basis for further research and development.