Conclusion

An inventory of the main analytical methods used to determine the criticality of industrial equipment illustrates the wide range of choices available. While most of them have different objectives and origins, they all require mastery of a number of essential tools, such as functional analysis, the fundamentals of the discipline of operational safety, and a sound knowledge of probabilities and statistics to exploit reliability data from experience feedback. Provided these conditions are met, it will be possible for the working group in charge of the criticality study to select risk measurement metrics to characterize its parameters, such as probability of occurrence, severity, probability of detection and criticality matrices.

However, it is first necessary to select the appropriate terminology to define the concepts associated with hazards and risks. This presents...