6. Different methods for assessing criticality

6.1 Preamble

The major difficulty in choosing a criticality assessment method depends on whether or not reliable feedback on equipment behavior is available in databases. Without feedback, only methods based on expert judgement will be useful, often using a consensus approach. In the presence of experience feedback, it is preferable to use analytical methods leading to quantitative assessments of the criticality level of equipment failures. This section presents the most common methods in these two categories.

6.2 Methods...