VCE Vienna Consulting Engineers ZT GmbH, IRIS project, 2013. — 656 p.
The activities involved in value chain based production have Ьесоте тоге complex with an increasing amount of interdependencies, new technologies and materials that introduce new risks in an ever changing environment. At the same time ош society has Ьесоте тоге risk averse.
Until the start of the IRIS project in 2008 very little had been done to identify industrial risk factors in а systematic manner and risk assessment and management was largely characterized Ьу its methodical diversity and fragmented approach. А shift to а new safety paradigm was therefore required in order to combine а тоге compet itive, innovative and better risk informed industry with а safer society in mind. This is exactly what IRIS has done in а systematic and structured way as duly illustrated through several large-scale demonstrations performed together with the industry. The demonstrations have been done to cover and visualize as many aspects of potential risks in the industry as possibIe, while keeping the users safety in mind, in order to better mitigate future risks.
The main concept of IRIS was to focus оп diverse industrial sectors' main safety рroЬ lems as well as to transform its requirements into integrated and knowledge-based safety technologies, standards and services. The IRIS Risk Paradigm is based оп three steps: 1) System modelling; 2) Risk quantification; 3) Uncertainty estimation. It is а comprehensive generic framework for risk management with the use of several interconnected tools. The demonstrations of the value of the IRIS Risk Paradigm have been very impressive indeed, some at а nearly unprecedented scale for an EU project (e.g. the destructive testing of an existing bridge оп motorway А 1 in Austria) and have led to new CEN standardization in the агеа . The data obtained through the demonstrations have led to results that сап Ье applied globally and have yielded а technical competitive expertise in Ешоре that will have long lasting consequences for the industrial safety as well as pubIic safety. This is exactly the kind of results that аге targeted in the European Framework Programme for Research and provides the "reason d'etre"for its existence. А project like IRIS is of course not possibIe without а team of world class experts in the field. In the case of IRIS this team consisted of 37 different partners from 14 countries in the European Union and 3 global partners as well as many тоге collaborators outside the project. AII bound together and catalysed Ьу the efficient and competent management from the Coordinator Johannes Kepler University Linz and VCE that enabIed the team to deliver all the envisioned objectives. Every team has а champion. For the IRIS project this champion was Dr. Helmut Wenzel, without whom the project would never have even started and without whom it would not have been possibIe to achieve such а successful outcome. Оп behalf of DG RTD and the European Commission I would like to congratulate the consortium with such an excellent outcome and hope that the obtained results will have а lasting impact оп our future.