Quantitative Risk Assessment (QRA) is widely practiced in system safety, but there is insufficient evidence that QRA in general is fit for purpose. Defenders of QRA draw a distinction between poor or misused QRA and correct, appropriately used QRA, but this distinction is only useful if we have robust ways to identify the flaws in an individual QRA. In this paper we present a comprehensive matu...

BACKGROUND Careful evaluation of the quality of human observational studies (HOS) is required to assess the suitability of HOS for quantitative risk assessment (QRA). In particular, the quality of quantitative exposure assessment is a crucial aspect of HOS to be considered for QRA. OBJECTIVE We aimed to develop guidelines for the evaluation of HOS for QRA and to apply these guidelines to case...

In safety, environmental, and financial regulation the public are often asked to accept estimates of a concept, “risk”, that they cannot directly perceive. Faith in these estimates is supported by logical reasoning but not by empirical evidence. Unfortunately, the evidence that does exist about risk phenomena indicates that human reasoning about risk is highly unreliable. In this paper we deter...

This article discusses the use of quantitative risk assessment (QRA) in decision making regarding the safety of complex technological systems. The insights gained by QRA are compared with those from traditional safety methods and it is argued that the two approaches complement each other. It is argued that peer review is an essential part of the QRA process. The importance of risk-informed rath...

An (n, 1, p)-Quantum Random Access (QRA) coding, introduced by Ambainis, Nayak, Ta-shma and Vazirani in ACM Symp. on Theory of Computing 1999, is the following communication system: The sender which has n-bit information encodes his/her information into one qubit, which is sent to the receiver. The receiver can recover any one bit of the original n bits correctly with probability at least p, th...

Urban road tunnels provide an increasingly cost-effective engineering solution, especially in compact cities like Singapore. For some urban road tunnels, tunnel characteristics such as tunnel configurations, geometries, provisions of tunnel electrical and mechanical systems, traffic volumes, etc. may vary from one section to another. These urban road tunnels that have characterized nonuniform p...

We consider a model of random access (slotted-aloha-type) communication networks of general topology. Assuming that network links receive exogenous arrivals of packets for transmission, we seek dynamic distributed random access strategies whose goal is to keep all network queues stable. We prove that two dynamic strategies, which we collectively call queue length based random access (QRA), ensu...

AIMS A ratio of distal renal pressure to aortic pressure (P(d)/P(a)) <0.90 can be considered a threshold for defining a significant renal artery stenosis (RAS). The aim of this study was to compare renal angiography (QRA) and colour duplex ultrasound (CDUS) to pressure measurements in assessing RAS. METHODS AND RESULTS In 56 RAS, percent diameter stenosis (DS(angio)), minimal luminal diameter...

Virtually no occupational exposure standards specify the level of risk for the prescribed exposure, and most occupational exposure limits are not based on quantitative risk assessment (QRA) at all. Wider use of QRA could improve understanding of occupational risks while increasing focus on identifying exposure concentrations conferring acceptably low levels of risk to workers. Exposure-response...

This paper studies generalizations of relation algebras to residuated lattices with a unary De Morgan operation. Several new examples of such algebras are presented, and it is shown that many basic results on relation algebras hold in this wider setting. The variety qRA of quasi relation algebras is defined and shown to be a conservative expansion of involutive FL-algebras. Our main result is t...