Revisiting Hazard Analysis Requirements

Hazard analysis is challenging, due to its highly contextual nature and the complexity of the real world. There are well-established hazard analysis procedures and approaches, such as, PHA, HAZOP, FMEA, Fault-Tree, LOPA, etc. Together with safety assurance guidelines and regulations of a particular industrial sector, these approaches can help improve the state of the practice. However, the evaluation of safety risks for a given situation, and the effective identification of the potential threat sources still rely on the imaginative composition of hazardous scenarios by the analysts based on his personal experience and expertise in the domain. In this paper, we define the conceptual model required for such story composition activity, and aims to provide an integrated approach to compose and comprehend the textual narratives based on images in-situ, hence the quality of the scenario description can be ensured and checked. We use historical safety hazard cases and safety training exercises to illustrate and evaluate the feasibility of the proposed approach.