Critical Analysis of a Safety and Security Incident Using FTA and RBD Analysis: A Case of Grenfell Tower Fire and Glasgow Airport Terrorist Attack
Abstract
Risk assessment and management is a requisite for sustain, reliable, safety and secure systems and environment. Regardless of risk assessment and management options and strategies applied by public and private entities as well as individuals, failure of systems with their associated risks still persists. A question is thus asked if indeed meaningful lessons are ever learnt from the failures and their consequences. Reliability is a very central attribute for operational safety measured based on the number of accidents per unit time. There are three primary factors that influence reliability in every system that is hardware, software and human reliability which must be maximized for safe and secure systems. These factors are the cornerstones of risk assessment and management which can be achieved through the application of various methods. The reliability of systems can be analysed through failure tree analysis (FTA) and reliability block diagram (RBD). FTA is a top-down risk assessment approach for analysis of failures that commences by following on the potential undesirable events such as accidents referred to as a TOP event and narrows down to ways in which the accident can occur. On the other hand, RBD focus on reliability is a system by looking at aspects of redundancies to ascertain the functionality of a system. Therefore, this paper focused on the use of FTA and RBD in an analysis of a safety and security incident in the United Kingdom. The safety incident of focus is the Grenfell Tower fire incident on June 14, 2017, while the security incident in the Glasgow airport terrorist attack on June 30, 2007.
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Copyright (c) 2019 Andrew Willis, Eunice Amanda
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