On the use of the hybrid causal logic method in offshore risk analysis

In the Norwegian offshore oil and gas industry risk analyses have been used to provide decision support for more than 20 years. The focus has traditionally been on the planning phase, but during the last years a need for better risk analysis methods for the operational phase has been identified. Such methods should take human and organizational factors into consideration in a more explicit way than the traditional risk analysis methods do. Recently, a framework, called hybrid causal logic (HCL), has been developed based on traditional risk analysis tools combined with Bayesian belief networks (BBNs), using the aviation industry as a case. This paper reviews this framework and discusses its applicability for the offshore industry, and the relationship to existing research projects, such as the barrier and operational risk analysis project (BORA). The paper also addresses specific features of the framework and suggests a new approach for the probability assignment process. This approach simplifies the assignment process considerably without loosing the flexibility that is needed to properly reflect the phenomena being studied.