Kritisktre

Kritisktre, literally meaning "critical tree" in Swedish, is a concept used in risk assessment and decision analysis to visualize how various factors or events contribute to a defined critical outcome. The term is not universally standardized and may be encountered in different fields under similar names or translated forms. In practice, a kritisktre is presented as a hierarchical or network-like diagram that highlights which branches most influence the top event.

A kritisktre is typically structured as a tree or directed acyclic graph where leaves represent basic risk factors or initiating events, internal nodes represent intermediate events or decisions, and the root node corresponds to the critical outcome or failure of interest. The emphasis is on identifying and prioritizing the branches that have the strongest impact on the top event, rather than simply enumerating all possible paths.

Construction generally involves: defining the top event, collecting contributing factors, establishing causal relationships, and evaluating significance through criteria such as probability, severity, or sensitivity. Analysts may prune non-critical branches to focus resources on mitigating the most influential paths, and the model is often iterated with expert input.

Applications include safety engineering, process safety, reliability analysis, and project risk management. Related methodologies include fault tree analysis, event tree analysis, and decision trees, with kritisktre serving as a tool to illuminate critical dependencies and guide mitigation strategies.