Quality and Reliability Engineering Series

Louis J. Gullo, Jack Dixon

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781118974315
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Engineering General
• Index: Technology & Engineering

A one-stop reference guide to design for safety principles and applications

Design for Safety (DfSa) provides design engineers and engineering managers with a range of tools and techniques for incorporating safety into the design process for complex systems. It explains how to design for maximum safe conditions and minimum risk of accidents. The book covers safety design practices, which will result in improved safety, fewer accidents, and substantial savings in life cycle costs for producers and users. Readers who apply DfSa principles can expect to have a dramatic improvement in the ability to compete in global markets. They will also find a wealth of design practices not covered in typical engineering books—allowing them to think outside the box when developing safety requirements.

Design Safety is already a high demand field due to its importance to system design and will be even more vital for engineers in multiple design disciplines as more systems become increasingly complex and liabilities increase. Therefore, risk mitigation methods to design systems with safety features are becoming more important. Designing systems for safety has been a high priority for many safety-critical systems—especially in the aerospace and military industries. However, with the expansion of technological innovations into other market places, industries that had not previously considered safety design requirements are now using the technology in applications.

Design for Safety:

• Covers trending topics and the latest technologies
• Provides ten paradigms for managing and designing systems for safety and uses them as guiding themes throughout the book
• Logically defines the parameters and concepts, sets the safety program and requirements, covers basic methodologies, investigates lessons from history, and addresses specialty topics within the topic of Design for Safety (DfSa)
• Supplements other books in the series on Quality and Reliability Engineering

Design for Safety is an ideal book for new and experienced engineers and managers who are involved with design, testing, and maintenance of safety critical applications. It is also helpful for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students in engineering.

Design for Safety is the second in a series of "Design for" books. Design for Reliability was the first in the series with more planned for the future.

1
Design for Safety Paradigms

Dev Raheja, Louis J. Gullo, and Jack Dixon

1.1 Why Design for System Safety?

Only through knowledge of a specific system’s performance can a person understand how to design for safety for that particular system. Anyone designing for safety should realize that there is no substitute for first‐hand knowledge of a system’s operating characteristics, architecture, and design topology. The most important parts of this knowledge is understanding the system—learning how it performs when functioning as designed, verifying how the system performs when applied under worst‐case conditions (including required environmental stress conditions), and experiencing faulty conditions (including mission‐critical failures and safety‐critical failures).

1.1.1 What Is a System?

A system is defined as a network or group of interdependent components and operational processes that work together to accomplish the objectives and requirements of the system. Safety is a very important aim of a system while executing and accomplishing its objectives and requirements. The design process of any system should ensure that everybody involved in using the system or developing the system gains something they need, avoiding the allure to sacrifice one critical part of the system design in favor of another critical part of the system. This context includes customers, system operators, maintenance personnel, suppliers, system developers, system safety engineers, the community, and the environment.

1.1.2 What Is System Safety?

System safety is the engineering discipline that drives toward preventing hazards and accidents in complex systems. It is a system‐based risk management approach that focuses on the identification of system hazards, analysis of these system hazards, and the application of system design improvements, corrective actions, risk mitigation steps, compensating provisions, and system controls. This system‐based risk management approach to safety requires the coordinated and combined applications of system management, systems engineering, and diverse technical skills to hazard identification, hazard analysis, and the elimination or reduction of hazards throughout the system life cycle.

1.1.3 Organizational Perspective

Taking a systems approach enables management to view its organization in terms of many internal and external interrelated organization and company business connections and interactions, as opposed to discrete and independent functional departments or processes managed by various chains of command within an organization. (Note: The term “organization” will be used throughout the book to refer to all system developer and customer entities to include businesses, companies, suppliers, operators, maintainers, and users of systems.) When all the connections and interactions are properly working together to accomplish a shared aim, an organization can achieve tremendous results, from improving the safety of its systems, products, and services to raising the creativity of an organization to increasing its ability to develop innovative solutions to help mankind progress.

1.2 Reflections on the Current State of the Art

System safety is defined as the application of engineering and management principles, criteria, and techniques to achieve acceptable risk within the constraints of operational effectiveness and suitability, time, and cost throughout all phases of the system life cycle [1]. We have come a long way since the early days of system safety in the 1960s. System safety in many organizations has been successfully integrated into the mainstream of systems engineering and is vigorously supported by management as a discipline that adds value to the product development process. Many analysis techniques have been created and revised numerous times to make them more effective and/or efficient. The application of system safety in product design and development has proven valuable in reducing accidents and product liability.

However, there are still many challenges facing system safety engineers. First and foremost, even after over 50 years, system safety is still a small and somewhat obscure discipline. It needs more visibility. While many organizations successfully implement system safety, many continue to ignore its benefits and suffer the consequences of delivering inferior, unsafe products.

Other challenges include the continually increasing complexity of systems being developed. Now, instead of only worrying about one system at a time, we must worry about building safe systems of systems. This additional complexity has introduced new challenges of how to address the interactions of all the systems that might make up a system‐of‐systems.

Inadequate specifications and requirements continue to plague the discipline. Too often weak, generic specifications are provided to the designers leading to faulty designs because the requirements were vague or ill defined.

The management of change is often another weakness in the product life cycle. As changes are made to the product or system, system safety must be involved to ensure that the changes themselves are safe and that they do not cause unintended consequences that could lead to accidents.

The human often causes safety problems by the way he uses, or abuses, the product. All too often the user can be confused by the complexity of a product or system or by the user interface provided by the software that operates it. Taking the human into consideration during the design process is paramount to its successful deployment.

The goal of this book is to he...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: What You Will Learn
• 1 Design for Safety Paradigms
• 2 The History of System Safety
• 3 System Safety Program Planning and Management
• 4 Managing Risks and Product Liabilities
• 5 Developing System Safety Requirements
• 6 System Safety Design Checklists
• 7 System Safety Hazard Analysis
• 8 Failure Modes, Effects, and Criticality Analysis for System Safety
• 9 Fault Tree Analysis for System Safety
• 10 Complementary Design Analysis Techniques
• 11 Process Safety Management and Analysis
• 12 System Safety Testing
• 13 Integrating Safety with Other Functional Disciplines
• 14 Design for Reliability Integrated with System Safety
• 15 Design for Human Factors Integrated with System Safety
• 16 Software Safety and Security
• 17 Lessons Learned
• 18 Special Topics on System Safety
• Appendix A: Hazards Checklist
• Appendix B: System Safety Design Verification Checklist
• Index
• End User License Agreement