Predicting the Validity of Expert Judgments in Assessing the Impact of Risk Mitigation Through Failure Prevention and Correction

AbstractOperational risk management of autonomous vehicles in extreme environments is heavily dependent on expert judgments and, in particular, judgments of the likelihood that a failure mitigation action, via correction and prevention, will annul the consequences of a specific fault. However, extant research has not examined the reliability of experts in estimating the probability of failure mitigation. For systems operations in extreme environments, the probability of failure mitigation is taken as a proxy of the probability of a fault not reoccurring. Usinga priori expert judgments for an autonomous underwater vehicle mission in the Arctic anda posteriori mission field data, we subsequently developed a generalized linear model that enabled us to investigate this relationship. We found that the probability of failure mitigation alone cannot be used as a proxy for the probability of fault not reoccurring. We conclude that it is also essential to include the effort to implement the failure mitigation when estimating the probability of fault not reoccurring. The effort is the time taken by a person (measured in person ‐months) to execute the task required to implement the fault correction action. We show that once a modicum of operational data is obtained, it is possible to define a generalized linear logistic model to estimate the probability a fault not reoccurring. We discuss how our findings are important t o all autonomous vehicle operations and how similar operations c...
Source: Risk Analysis - Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Tags: Original Research Article Source Type: research