Probabilistic Risk Assessment (PRA)
Probabilistic Risk Assessment is the comprehensive, quantitative method for analyzing risk in complex engineered systems by answering three questions: what can go wrong, how likely is it, and how bad would it be. Kaplan and Garrick's 1981 paper gave the field its enduring definition of risk as a set of triplets — scenario, frequency, and consequence — and showed how to extend that definition to incorporate uncertainty through probability distributions. The NASA Probabilistic Risk Assessment Procedures Guide (NASA/SP-2011-3421) operationalizes this framework for high-consequence aerospace systems, combining initiating-event analysis, event trees and fault trees, consequence modeling, and formal uncertainty propagation into an integrated assessment. Unlike qualitative hazard identification, PRA produces a quantified risk picture — typically a frequency-of-exceedance curve with explicit uncertainty bounds — that supports decisions about where scarce safety resources will reduce risk most.
Source record
Citations copied verbatim from the method’s source record. No claim-level verification is inferred from them.
- Stamatelatos, M., Dezfuli, H., et al. (2011). Probabilistic Risk Assessment Procedures Guide for NASA Managers and Practitioners (2nd ed.), NASA/SP-2011-3421. NASA, Washington, DC. · URL
- Kaplan, S., & Garrick, B. J. (1981). On The Quantitative Definition of Risk. Risk Analysis, 1(1), 11-27. · DOI 10.1111/j.1539-6924.1981.tb01350.x
Curated claims
Claims persisted in the evidence ledger, each with its own assessment.
This view does not invent a claim assessment when the ledger has none.
Related methods
Generated from the method graph and shown as machine-suggested relations — no evidence claim is inferred.