Identification and characterization of 'Black Swans' in technological events in Brazil

摘要

“Black swan” events represent a critical issue in risk analysis. Events with extremely low probability of occurrence are in general discarded from the risk analysis process. This paper aims to identify and characterize four accidents that occurred in Brazil into the following classes: “not a black swan”, “black swan: unknown-unknown”, “black swan: unknown-known” and “black Swan: not believed to occur”, by obtaining from experts the distribution of belief for the real probability of each class. Results showed that, throughout all cases analyzed, the class “black swan: unknown-unknown” was never reported, which means that none of the cases studied were a complete surprise to anyone. The method used was able to assign all accident events to the remaining classes. Probability distribution elicited from experts showed large disagreement among them, and the expected value was considered low. Nevertheless, the elicited distributions can be utilized in future risk analysis as a priori distribution in a Bayesian approach.