Risk Assessment (RA)

Risk assessment is a formal and systematic process to identify and quantify events and frequencies / probabilities and the magnitude of consequences / losses to recipients due to exposure to hazards from failures involving natural events and failures of hardware, software, and human system.
A risk assessment amounts to addressing three very basic questions:

• What can happen / what can go wrong?
• How likely is it that it will happen?
• If it happens, what are the consequences?

RA can be understood as a process of decision-making based on risks. RAs should consider all phases of the lifecycle of a technical system from the early concept phases to the end of the service life including decommissioning. The RA should include a description of all relevant assumptions made in connection with the system identification, as well as the modeling of consequences and frequencies. The level and type of knowledge available to support the assumptions, as well as the modeling of consequences and frequencies, should be explicitly stated.