Problems of Optimizing Costs to Reduce the Risk of Accidents

Abstract

With the development of production, the costs of investments in safety are growing, which requires the use of more efficient technologies to reduce risk. It is shown that already in the USSR in the normative legal acts they tried to take into account that safety is both a social and economic problem. The legislation of the Russian Federation implements two approaches to solving the problem of safety based on risk analysis. In accordance with the first approach, the rules are mandatory, but deviation from their requirements is allowed by a Safety Case based on a risk assessment. In the second, the rules are voluntary and the risk analysis is performed in order to justify the sufficiency of the applied safety solutions, as the absence of an unacceptable risk. The basis for comparison when establishing an acceptable risk can be the background risk created by people, the environment, property and other recipients from sources of hazard existing in the region where the hazardous production facility is located, independent of the hazardous production facility under consideration. If the risk, created by sources of hazard independent of the hazardous production facility, is higher than the risk created by the hazardous production facility itself, then further costs for its reduction do not affect the total risk of the recipient. It is shown that in this case, risk reduction decisions can be made in accordance with the ALARP principle. The purpose of applying the ALARP principle, combined with the search for new and better solutions, is to continuously identify best practices as they emerge, to ensure that they become the good practice of tomorrow. The more effective and less costly decisions made can be used to continuously improve safety standards (set of rules). In the process of quantitative risk assessment using the fault tree (FTA) and event tree (ETA), taking into account the cost of the selected safety systems and the expected damage in accordance with the ALARP principle, real optimization dependencies can be built for optimizing safety costs.