Risk In Early Design Research Articles

Investigating new risk reduction and mitigation in the oil and gas industry

The complexity of the processes and the nature of volatile petroleum products urged the oil and gas industry to utilize various risk assessment techniques to identify potential failure modes that can interrupt operation processes. Consequently, government agencies and nonprofit professional societies guide the industry with regulatory guidelines, standards, and best recommended practices to oversee the operations management, assure safe working environment, and contain failures within tolerable limits. Yet, accidents due to electro-mechanical failures still occur and result in various consequences. Accordingly, critics have raised concerns about the petroleum industry's safety and risk mitigation credentials and question its ability to prevent future major accidents. Therefore, new risk assessment tools need to be introduced to provide decision makers and novice engineers with a diverse perception of potential risks. The aim of this paper is verify the application of Risk in Early Design (RED), a product risk assessment tool, in identifying potential failures in the oil and gas industry. Approximately thirty major accident underwent the RED analysis to verify the software's application to identify and rank potential failure modes.

Variations in Risk Management Models: A Comparative Study of the Space Shuttle Challenger Disasters

:Managers seeking to assess risk within complex systems face enormous challenges. They must identify a seemingly endless number of risks and develop contingency plans accordingly. This study explores the strengths and limitations of two categories of risk assessment tools: product assessment techniques including Failure Mode and Effect Analysis (FMEA) and Risk in Early Design (RED) and process assessment techniques, such as Layer of Protection Analysis (LOPA) and the Swiss Cheese Model (SCM). A NASA case study is used to evaluate these risk assessment models. The case study considers the January, 1986, explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger, 73 seconds after liftoff. This incident resulted in the loss of seven crew members and consequently grave criticisms of NASA's risk management practices. The article concludes with comparison and recommendations for engineering managers on selecting risk assessment tools for complex systems.

Business Risk in Early Design: A Business Risk Assessment Approach

:Nine out of ten new businesses fail within their first two years. Business failures not only affect a company, but may impact a country's economic performance. Risk assessment is an area of significant concern for numerous businesses in today's capricious marketplace, because consequences resulting from such risks can seriously affect visibility of business operations, profitability, quality of service, and convenience. This article presents the Business Risk in Early Design (B-RED) method for preliminary risk assessments based on historical business failures. A B-RED preliminary risk assessment of Arthur Andersen is discussed as an illustration of the methodology.

Identifying Risk at the Conceptual Product Design Phase: A Web-Based Software Solution and Its Evaluation

This paper introduces a web-based application that enables engineers or designers to identify risks during the conceptual phase of a product design. This software application was developed based on the Risk in Early Design (RED) method developed by Author, Stone, and Tumer. The RED method demonstrates that risks can be identified in the early phase of product design by relating recorded historical failure information to product functions. Based on the concept of RED theory and current industry needs, the goals of a web-based RED application were defined. These goals are the intended benefits or functionalities that the web-based RED application would provide. In addition, a multi-level evaluation framework was adopted to determine how well the application meets the needs of various organizations. As part of the evaluation, a questionnaire was developed and administered to a sample industrial and academic user group. The results of the evaluation indicate that the web-based RED software application meets many of the goals to help an organization in performing product risk analysis.

A Step Toward Risk Mitigation During Conceptual Product Design: Component Selection for Risk Reduction

The objective of this article is to introduce a method that will mitigate product risks during the conceptual design phase by identifying design variables that affect product failures. By using this comprehensive, step-by-step process that combines existing techniques in a new way, designers can begin with a simple functional model and emerge from the conceptual design phase with specific components selected with many risks already mitigated. The risk in early design (RED) method plays a significant role in identifying failure modes by functions, and these modes are then analyzed through modeling equations or lifespan analyses, in such a manner that emphasizes variables under the designers’ control. With the valuable insight this method provides, informed decisions can be made early in the process, thereby eliminating costly changes later on.

Function-based failure propagation for conceptual design

AbstractWhen designing a product, the earlier the potential risks can be identified, the more costs can be saved, as it is easier to modify a design in its early stages. Several methods exist to analyze the risk in a system, but all require a mature design. However, by applying the concept of “common interfaces” to a functional model and utilizing a historical knowledge base, it is possible to analyze chains of failures during the conceptual phase of product design. This paper presents a method based on these common interfaces to be used in conjunction with other methods such as risk in early design to allow a more complete risk analysis during the conceptual design phase. Finally, application of this method is demonstrated in a design setting by applying it to a thermal control subsystem.

The risk in early design method

Risk assessments are necessary to anticipate and prevent accidents from occurring or repeating. Current probabilistic risk assessment methods require mature design proposals to analyse. Since product safety and reliability are affected the most by decisions made during the early design phases, a risk assessment that can be performed with less mature data during these design phases is needed. This study focuses specifically on the relationship between function and risk in early design by presenting a mathematical mapping from product function to risk assessments that can be used in the conceptual design phase. An investigation of a spacecraft orientation subsystem is used to demonstrate the mappings. The results from the study and its spacecraft application yield a preliminary risk assessment method that can be used to identify and assess risks as early as the conceptual phase of design. The preliminary risk assessment presented in this paper is a tool that will aid designers by identifying risks as well as reducing the subjectivity of the likelihood and consequence value from a risk element, will provide four key risk element properties (design parameter, failure mode, likelihood, and consequence) for numerous risk elements with simple calculations, and will provide a means for inexperienced designers to effectively address risk in the conceptual design phase.

Failure Prevention in Design Through Effective Catalogue Utilization of Historical Failure Events

The science of failure prevention relies heavily on the experience of personnel on a project. As the nation is about to face a tremendous decline in the experienced workforce due to the baby boomer generation’s retirement, it is critical to begin focusing on capturing their knowledge. Cataloging and communicating the knowledge of potential failures is critical to prevent engineering disasters. Many companies have adopted failure-reporting systems that allow them to record their engineering failures to promote failure prevention. While recording this information is vital to learning from past mistakes, often the information is not stored so that engineers and designers can easily recall this valuable linguistic information and use it to improve designs. Therefore, more effective systems for cataloging and utilizing corporate memory of recorded failure events are needed. This article presents the design of a computational linguistic database to support the failure prevention tool, the risk in early design (RED) method. RED promotes failure prevention by identifying failure risks as early as the conceptual phase of product design, where impacts of failure prevention are greatest. It uses a database populated by historical failure event information to present specific areas that are at risk of failure in a product.