Member Article

Leading Risk Management Consultancy to Deliver Papers at Renowned Industry Event

Three well respected consultants of the UKs largest integrated Human Factors, Safety and Risk Consultancy – Corporate Risk Associates (CRA) – will be presenting papers at this year’s highly acclaimed European Safety and Reliability (ESREL) Conference.

The event – taking place in Glasgow in September – brings together key researchers and practitioners in safety, reliability, risk, resilience and asset management to share ideas of new approaches to tackling problems industry sectors are currently facing. It boasts a host of esteemed international speakers with tutorials programmed to be delivered by well-known academics.

Les Ainsworth, one of CRA’s Chief Consultants, will be responsible for presenting one paper and Graduate Consultant, Francesca Brandford-Adams will present a second paper alongside Principal Consultant, Ashraf El-Shanawany. The individual papers will provide insights into their recent research and real-world applications.

Speaking about the papers Jasbir Sidhu, CEO and founder at CRA said: “More than 400 papers have been submitted by leading academics and industry practitioners across the world and we are delighted that following peer review, three of our world class consultants have been selected to give a talk on their findings.

“This is true testament to the calibre of our highly skilled workforce. And this - combined with our unparalleled reputation of delivering leading risk management programmes - means that we are in prime position to be offered fantastic opportunities such as this, enabling our thoughts and findings to be discussed with like-minded industry experts.”

With over 35 years of practical experience of human factors and human reliability in complex systems, Les will be delivering a paper on the rationalisation and updating of data on selected performance shaping factors. Based on Les’ findings he will be making suggestions that should enable human reliability assessors to make more realistic estimates of potential human error.

With a keen interest in the nuclear industry, Les was involved in the Nuclear Inspectorate’s first human factors study and has seen human reliability assessment develop from the first practical method right through to an essential tool to reduce risks in safety critical systems.

Ashraf, along with Francesca, will be delivering a paper on the use of structured expert judgment methods to aid in parameter estimations for data sparse problems. The paper will present an overview of the Structured Expert Judgement (SEJ) method, reporting the results of sample workshops conducted on a sample problem.

Ashraf has spent the last four years researching uncertainty analysis for probabilistic models at Imperial College London – funded by CRA and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) – and has recently completed his doctoral thesis. He is currently involved in industry led research projects to assess software reliability and the reliability of smart control and instrumentation.

Jasbir added: “We are very much looking forward to the conference and delivering our thought-provoking papers. We firmly believe our ideas presented – which have been developed from extensive hands on research – will offer a new practical approach to rationalising and updating data as well as providing solutions to solve data sparse problems.”

This year’s ESREL conference is hosted at the Technology and Innovation Centre based at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow with social events taking place at the City Chambers and Kelvingrove Museum.

CRA, established 16 years ago, specialises in managing safety, reliability, human factors issues and risk across the nuclear, oil and gas, transportation and defence industries. CRA was recently awarded the industry accolade of Risk Management Specialist of the Year by industry body Continuity Insurance and Risk (CIR). CRA is also proud to have been awarded the Institute of Physics Best Practice in Professional Development Award.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Scarab4 .