An integral approach to the use of probabilistic risk assessment methods

In this chapter some of the work developed at the Instituto de Investigaciones Electricas in the area of probabilistic risk analysis are presented. In this area, work has been basically focused in the following directions: development and implementation of methods, and applications to real systems. The first part of this paper describes the area of methods development and implementation, presenting an integrated package of computer programs for fault tree analysis. In the second part some of the most important applications developed for real systems are presented. (author)