Safety Engineering

Definition

Safety Engineering

the activity consisting of the cohesive collection of all tasks that are primarily performed to ensure that the acceptable level of safety risk of an endeavor and its work products is not exceeded

Classification

As illustrated in the preceding figure, Safety Engineering is part of the following inheritance hierarchy:

• Type: Abstract
• Superclass: Activity
• Subclasses:
  • Endeavor Safety Engineering:
    • Business Enterprise Safety Engineering
    • Program Safety Engineering
    • Project Safety Engineering
  • Work Product Safety Engineering:
    • System Safety Engineering
    • Application Safety Engineering
    • Component Safety Engineering:
      • Business Facility Safety Engineering
      • Data Component Safety Engineering
      • Hardware Component Safety Engineering
      • Software Component Safety Engineering

Responsibilities

The typical responsibilities of Safety Engineering are to:

• Manage the safety program
• Protect valuable assets from accidental harm
• Detect safety incidents (i.e., accidents and near misses)
• React to safety incidents
• Adapt to avoid future incidents
• Management:
  
  • Develop a safety program and document it in a safety program plan.
  • Monitor the status of the safety program.
  • Assess and certify compliance of:
    • The endeavor to its safety program plan.
    • Work products to their safety goals and requirements.
• Protection:
  
  • Avoid accidental harm to valuable assets.
  • Eliminate accidents or mitigate their negative consequences.
  • Eliminate or mitigate hazards
  • Develop safety requirements
  • Ensure that safety risks are at an acceptable level
• Detection:
  
  • Identify safety incidents as they occur
  • Log safety-related events
• Reaction
  
  • Analyze and report all safety-related events
  • Degrade and restore services
• Adaptation:
  
  • Analyze trends
  • Improve safeguards

Preconditions

Safety engineering typically may begin when the following preconditions hold:

• The safety team is adequately staffed and trained in the safety engineering tasks.

Completion Criteria

Safety engineering is typically complete when the following postconditions hold:

• Retirement of threatened assets.
• Completion of the retirement phase.

Tasks

Safety Engineering typically involves the following producers performing the following tasks:

• Safety Team, which performs:
  • Safety Program Planning
  • Safety Risk Analysis
  • Incident Investigation
  • Safety Monitoring
  • Safety Compliance Assessment
• External regulatory body, which performs:
  • Safety Certification

Environments

Safety Engineering is typically performed using the following environment(s) and associated tools:

• Development Environments:
  • Safety Tools
• Production Environments:
  • Safety Tools

Work Products

Safety Engineering typically results in the production of the following work products:

• Safety Work Products:
  • Incident Investigation Report
  • Safety Certificate
  • Safety Compliance Report
  • Safety Compliance Repository
  • Safety Program Plan
  • Safety Risk Analysis Report
  • Safety Status Report
• Requirements Work Products:
  • Safety Requirements
  • Safety Subsystem Requirements
  • Safety Constraints

Phases

Safety Engineering tasks are typically performed individual phases as documented in the following table:

Guidelines

• The following diagram illustrates the fundamental concepts for safety engineering and the important relationships between them:
  
  
  
  
• The following diagram illustrates the decomposition of safety engineering into its component tasks and work products. Note that all safety tasks update the safety compliance repository. Ellipses represent safety tasks, rectangles represent safety work products, and arrows represent the input and output relationships between them:
  
  
  
  
• Safety Engineering is closely related to the following other activities:
  • Requirements Engineering,
    during which safety requirements are elicited, analyzed, specified, and managed.
  • Architecting,
    during which common safeguards (safety architectural mechanisms) are identified and selected.
  • Quality Engineering,
    during which safety processes and work products are evaluated via safety reviews and safety audits.
  • Environments Engineering,
    during which safe environments are produced and maintained.
  • Management,
    during which adequate resources and qualified safety personnel are provided.
  • Risk Management,
    during which safety risks (among others) are identified, analyzed, documented, monitored, avoided, and mitigated.
  • Testing,
    during which failure modes and effects testing (FMET) occurs.
• The following diagram illustrates the relationships between safety engineering and some of the other engineering activities: