Abstract
The experience has demonstrated that the operation of even very reliable systems may be very risky if the consequences of failures are very severe and large, nevertheless how low are the probabilities of failures occurrence. Since the risk is a combination of failure probability and failure consequence, along with reliability and failure analysis all possible risks have to be thoroughly investigated. This is the fundamental of the risk concept that is nowadays emerged in all sectors of our live, in industry, transportation, economy, health care, environment protection, water resources, electric supply, etc. Since consequences of failures and other unfavorable events by nature are not only technical, but may be determined by other criteria (health, safety, economy, market), the risk concept imposes new requirements to engineers, asking them to modify traditional way of looking at risk. The paper briefly discusses the problem from the view point of an automobile engineer, pointing out to the new practices such as risk-based design, risk-based production and risk-based maintenance which have to be developed for this engineering area.