Meanings of those words are very different and it is very important to distinguish them:
. HAZARD indicates presence of POTENTIAL DANGER: a water source is maybe pollute, you put a « HAZARD » sign on it. If after analysis you don’t find any bad molecule, you can drink the glass of water.
. CRITICALITY indicates a measurable level of DANGER. During a critical situation, CRITICALITY is measured by « time to collision », « probability of interception of trajectories », etc… in road safety.
. RISK indicates the absence of caution: if you put a glass near the edge of the table, you take a RISK. In this case HAZARD is the edge of the table. If the glass falls, at every moment you can measure CRITICALITY of the situation. If you have good reflexes, you can catch the glass. This is what AEB does for vehicles (ADAS).
If you want to avoid breaking the glass without using reflexes, you put the glass away from the edge. In road safety, it’s the same, and NEXYAD has developed a real-time embedded software tool that measures « how far we are from the edge » in order to stay in the safe zone.
Applications are: alert driver, or act automatically on the driving behavior of the vehicle (ACC, Autonomous Driving).
