It Is All About Decisions

This paper addresses the importance of conducting reliability and risk analyses with the aim to support decision making. It presents geotechnical case histories from offshore applications to demonstrate how reliability and risk analyses can be used to inform project-specific design decisions, design practice and public policy. It offers the following lessons: (1) Taking a top-down perspective on how the analyses will be used in decision making fosters efficiency by focusing on the aspects of the problem that are most relevant; (2) There is a continuous need to keep track of and make use of what happened once a decision was made so that what was learned can be leveraged for future decisions; (3) Having frank, open and thoughtful discussions with stakeholders about consequences is valuable in providing useful information; and (4) Assessing and managing risk effectively requires a system perspective and multi-disciplinary collaboration.

Keywords: Decision analysis, Reliability-based design, Risk assessment, Offshore facilities.