Selecting and Checking Data Series
Paul Meylan, Anne-Catherine Favre, Andre Musy · Science Publishers eBooks · 2012
In this chapter we show that the probability of occurrence of an event being greater than a given magnitude should never be the sole criterion on which to base a decision to execute a project or upgrade an existing project, and should never be the sole criterion for designing a structure. Once we have exposed this issue, we look at the concept of risk in relatively summary fashion, but with enough detail to understand the fundamental aspects of this very important idea, which is complementary to the concept of probability. We will also clarify as precisely as possible some of the terms and concepts connected to the notion of risk, because many of these related words are often poorly understood, or interpreted differently in various references. This is also why, for reasons of clarity, we use the term probability of failure in the second half of this chapter, and keep the term risk for later on when we have defined it more precisely in Section 2.3. But before we get to this concept of risk and its related context, it is helpful to define the concept of return period, as we have mentioned in the previous chapter. We also explore how return period is computed using probabilities.