ABSTRACT
The Life Quality Index has been proposed for assessing acceptable and affordable safety for technical facilities. It yields a monetary value for the reduction of risk to be used in optimization and a criterion for acceptable risk. The acceptability criterion is an efficiency criterion for the necessary cost for risk reduction. It further involves demographic constants, the GDP per capita and the fraction of life expectancy necessary for work. Because failures usually occur randomly in time in the future the acceptability criterion also depends on the anticipated time of use of the facility. In particular, the future demographic developments and some discounting has to be introduced for the investments in risk reduction. First estimates for the future demographic constants are provided. The theory is applied to a simple example.
