2023
Volume 23, Number 2/3, pp. 61-64
On the use of dichotomous variables in safety engineering and management
Jeremy J. Ramsden
Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, The University of Buckingham, MK18 1EG, UK
The purpose of this note is to illustrate the usefulness of allowing hazard variables to take binary instead of continuous values. The benefit of the former is a far more tractable and transparent model of a potentially hazardous system. Furthermore, unlike in much of medicine, binary values may actually be more natural and hence anyway more appropriate.
Keywords: Bernoulli, binomial, critical, digital, dimension, failure, fuzzification, phase transition