iQRAS

Understanding risk and having the right strategies in place when an incident occurs is becoming more evident and essential. More and more, organizations are faced with the need to measure and reduce their risks. A successful and effective approach to risk management critically depends on the ability to answer key questions:

. How large are our risks?
. What are the most likely risk scenarios and how severe would the consequences be?
. What elements in our system or organization are the major contributors to risk?
. How will our risk be affected by changes to the system or organization?
. How confident are we about the answers to the above, and how can we increase our confidence?

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...Quantitative Risk
Assessment System
Software...

Do you have to analyze multiple or single factors to address the uncertainties when reducing your risk? Do you consider such factors as: systems, processes, organization, people, communication and unforeseen elements as part of your risk assessments?

Do you need to construct scenarios with many elements or factors during your risk assessment? Do you consider elements that could adversely effect your organization's mission, proposal, production, finances, design, acquisition, schedule, requirements, and management?

Do these elements or factors pose a threat or potential risk on their own or have an effect on other parts of the organization?

Item Quantitative Risk Assessment System (iQRAS) can help identify the risks, find the major contributors, effective ways to reduce the risks, and improve your understanding. The initiating event integration with time lines, event sequences, failure probability characterization, risk ranking, and sensitivity analysis, provides you with a powerful, integrated, risk analysis environment. Other Probabilistic Risk Assessment (PRA) tools cannot match the unique integration of capabilities in iQRAS.

What is iQRAS

iQRAS is a user friendly software tool with a fully integrated environment for constructing and analyzing risk models. A powerful aid for conducting PRA, you can construct and quantify risk scenario models, estimate numerical risk levels, and identify major risk contributors.

Although initially developed for NASA, the features of iQRAS allow it to be applied to a wide range of applications, including aerospace, military, transportation, as well as medical procedures. iQRAS was designed to be used by a wide range of engineers and analysts. It is suitable for use by safety engineers who are seeking to enhance their safety analyses.

iQRAS is the latest addition to Item Software's suite of risk and reliability-software tools. The latest version of the software completes the transformation from the original software as developed by the University of Maryland and NASA. The new environment provides an extensive set of editing and reporting capabilities, in line with those found in ITEM ToolKit, our flagship suite of tools for reliability, availability, maintainability and safety analysis.

On the computational side, iQRAS offers state-of-the-art algorithms that are both highly efficient and, unlike conventional solution methods used in most other tools, are not subject to often significant approximation errors.

Modelling and Analysis Capabilities

With iQRAS you can develop risk models in the form of event sequence diagrams and fault tree models. Event Sequence Diagrams (ESD) describe the possible risk scenarios following potential perturbations of normal system operations. Pivotal events in the risk scenarios are further detailed using fault tree models or other distributions. This defines the occurrence of those pivotal events as logical combinations of one or more basic events. Each scenario eventually leads to an end-state and consequence that designates the severity of the outcome of the particular scenario.

The Event Sequence Diagrams are organized using a system hierarchy, consisting of structural or functional decomposition. A mission timeline allows the break down of the overall mission into multiple mission phases. This organizing capability makes for easy navigation between the potentially large numbers of event sequence diagram models, and tailors the risk scenarios to the particular conditions of a mission phase.

A wide variety of quantification models are available to specify the likelihood of occurrence of basic events. These include standard demand-based and time-based reliability models, as well as highly customizable models that take advantage of the optional link with Mathematica®.

Additionally, iQRAS contains a centralized common cause failure-modeling feature. This enables common cause failure effects to be introduced across multiple fault trees. This feature significantly reduces the burden of introducing and maintaining common cause failure events in a model.

Parameters in all models are specified by means of uncertainty distributions, which can be formed by common parametric models such as the lognormal, uniform, gamma, beta distributions, and probability histograms. For each distribution iQRAS contains flexible input modes that allow the parameters of the distribution to suit the needs of the analysis.

Risk results can be obtained at the fault tree, risk scenario, or end state level. They can also be aggregated over multiple event sequence diagrams associated with a specific portion of the system hierarchy and/or a portion of the mission timeline. Analysis features include the estimation of total probability of reaching specific (undesirable) end states; the ranking of risk scenarios or risk scenario initiators by total risk contribution; cut-set analysis for the identification and ranking of critical combinations of events leading to a particular end state or consequence; and the computation of importance measures indicating the impact of individual basic events on the overall risk.

iQRAS employs state-of-the-art Binary Decision Diagram-based analysis techniques, which are not subject to approximation errors found in traditional analysis techniques. Studies have shown these errors may span orders of magnitude. Monte Carlo (Latin Hypercube) Sampling including based uncertainty propagation techniques are used to determine the uncertainty surrounding numerical results. Separate importance measures are provided to identify the events contributing the most to overall uncertainty.

iQRAS Major Features

Risk Model Analysis
. Exact results generated by Binary Decision Diagram (BDD) based solution methods
. Computation of cut-sets, risk importance measures, probabilities for fault trees and ESDs
. Uncertainty propagation and uncertainty importance measures
. Risk aggregation over event sequence diagrams, end state types, and system or functional hierarchy

Organization of Risk Models
. Organization of ESD models by user-defined system or function hierarchy
. Organization of ESD models by mission phases and operational time intervals
. Easy navigation between the ESDs and fault trees

Common Cause Failure Modelling
. Centralized definition of common cause failure event groups
. Automated application of common cause failure expansions to selected fault tree models
. Support for Alpha and Beta Factor models
. Common cause failure expansions within and across fault trees

Quantification Models
. Extensive set of time-dependent and demand based component reliability models
. Easy-to-use specification of uncertainty distributions for model parameters
. Mathmatica® (not included)

Incorporation of Other Models
. ITEM ToolKit

Event Sequence Diagram Quantification
. Quantification of ESDs using the fault tree list created in the fault tree editor
. View and attach fault trees from the pivotal/initiating event quantification dialogs
. The fault tree editor can be opened and used independently to create and quantify the fault trees
. User can change ESD events designators

Gate ESD Detail Results
. User defined number of cut sets that iQRAS will calculate based on probability. iQRAS can also display the actual number of cut sets for the analyzed system. For example; the advanced BDD algorithm could calculate the top 500 cut sets, even if the actual cuts were more than a billion, within seconds
. Users can get detailed uncertainty results for any gate

Reporting, Export of Risk Models and Results
. Export of models and results to Microsoft Word, Excel and Access
. Extensive reporting capabilities using Crystal ReportsT