System Analysis in Risk Assessment

Elisabeth Paté-Cornell, Stanford University

System analysis stands in the center of most risk analysis. Deconstructing the system, one breaks it down into classes of scenarios that can allow an analyst to better understand how something can fail. The two biggest classes are dependencies on external factors and human error. Dr. Elisabeth Paté-Cornell, department chair of Management Science and Engineering at Stanford University, explains that you look at these types of scenarios because there are not enough reliable statistics.