Michael V. Frank

Forthcoming March 2008

"The most notable contributions are its practical approach to risk assessment and decision-making and the case studies...This is a first-rate how-to book. The case studies are particularly valuable for engineering students in aerospace, mechanical, chemical, and nuclear programs."
-- William E. Kastenberg, University of California, Berkeley

The technological age has seen catastrophic and preventable failures from buildings and bridges to space and launch vehicles, from chemical factories to nuclear power plants, from ships to airplanes, and from trains to automobiles. Often the root cause can be traced to decisions that did not appropriately consider safety as a factor in design and engineering. The ideas, methods, and case studies of this book are at the nexus of probabilistic risk assessment and decision analysis. This book melds these two technologies into a method of building safety into a system or product from the very beginning of its development.

Choosing Safety is the first book to bring together probabilistic risk assessment and decision analysis using real case studies. By virtue of more than a dozen practical examples from the author’s experience in nuclear power, aerospace, and other potentially hazardous facilities, the book focuses on methods for making logical decisions about complex engineered systems and products in which safety is a key factor in design - and where failure can cause great harm, injury, or death. In a nutshell, it shows when, where and how probabilistic risk assessment fits into decision analysis. This book provides the needed guidance and formal procedures to include safety in project decisions.

Choosing Safety is for managers, project leaders, engineers, and scientists who create, design, develop, operate or maintain high consequence, complex systems and products. The book is also for students and anyone else interested in a broad perspective about the union of decision analysis and probabilistic risk assessment.

Michael V. Frank holds a Ph.D. in nuclear engineering from UCLA. He has had decades of experience as a consultant in probabilistic risk assessment, decision analysis, and hazard analysis for both private industry and government, in areas ranging over nuclear reactors, aerospace systems, consumer products, nuclear fuel fabrication, and nuclear waste disposal.