Integrated deterministic and probabilistic safety assessment: Concepts, challenges, research directions

• IDPSA contributes to robust risk-informed decision making in nuclear safety.
• IDPSA considers time-dependent interactions among component failures and system process.
• Also, IDPSA considers time-dependent interactions among control and operator actions.
• Computational efficiency by advanced Monte Carlo and meta-modelling simulations.
• Efficient post-processing of IDPSA output by clustering and data mining.

Integrated deterministic and probabilistic safety assessment (IDPSA) is conceived as a way to analyze the evolution of accident scenarios in complex dynamic systems, like nuclear, aerospace and process ones, accounting for the mutual interactions between the failure and recovery of system components, the evolving physical processes, the control and operator actions, the software and firmware. In spite of the potential offered by IDPSA, several challenges need to be effectively addressed for its development and practical deployment. In this paper, we give an overview of these and discuss the related implications in terms of research perspectives.