Preface - ROSS
Preface
Preface
This page provides some additional information to the Preface of the book Risk Assessment; Theory, Methods, and Applications
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Previous books by the same author
The Norwegian standard NS 5814 "Krav til risikoanalyser" (Requirements to Risk Analyses) was issued in 1991. In parallel with the development of this standard, I wrote a small book in Norwegian called "Risikoanalyse - En veiledning til NS 5814" (Risk Analysis - A guide to NS 5814). If success can be measured by the number of copies sold, this small book was a success.
In 2008 a new version of NS 5814 called "Krav til risikovurderinger" (Requirements to Risk Assessments) was issued. A new book was then written by myself and Ingrid Bouwer Utne and published by Tapir Akademisk Forlag in Trondheim in 2009. This book is called "Risikoanalyse: Teori og metoder" and has a structure similar to "Risk Assessment: Theory, Methods, and Applications". Most of this book was, however, written before we started to write the Tapir-book.
I started writing this book as early as 1995 and has been working with the manuscript more or less actively during more than fifteen years. In 1995, I had just finished writing the first edition of "System Reliability Theory" and thought that writing a risk assessment book would be as easy as writing a reliability analysis book. After a while, however, I started to realize why there are so many reliability analysis books and so few risk assessment books on the market.
Available literature
Risk analysis and risk assessment are topics of great public interest and a huge number of reports, guidelines and papers are available in the public domain. A very high number of scientific papers have been published at conferences and in journals. These papers span very wide - ranging from purely technical papers to papers in human factors, sociological, psychological, political, and philosophical journals. The authors are using different terminology and are quarreling about the meaning of the various terms.
During the last fifteen years, I have been reading a long range of guidelines, reports, and papers and found many of these to be of very high quality. I have especially enjoyed reading reports and guidelines from the following organizations:
- U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) - NUREG reports
- UK Health and Safety Executive (HSE)
- NASA
- Department of Planning, NSW, Australia (especially the HIPAP reports)
When reading these reports and guidelines, I have made a lot of notes. I have tried to keep track of all these notes, but it might be that I have mixed them up and copied statements from other sources into my book, believing that it was written by myself many years ago. I have done my best to avoid this, but I cannot guarantee that it has not happened. If so, I apologize whole-heartedly.