Real-time risk estimation for better situational awareness

Recent calamities have demonstrated that risks are often not well communicated to management level. Operational risks are difficult to communicate and hard to assess. Research performed at the University of Leiden and adopted by Shell has resulted in the acceptance of BowTie diagrams as a way to communicate risks between specialists and non-specialists, as the BowTie approach takes into account threats and consequences, as well as control measures and recovery measures. This paper discusses the application of such diagrams in a real-time software environment as part of the supervisory control system, as part of the independent advanced control system or as part of the high performance human machine interface.