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System
safety and reliability engineering is an engineering
discipline. Continuous changes in technology,
environmental regulation and public safety concerns
make the analysis of complex safety-critical systems
more and more demanding.
A common fallacy, for example among electrical
engineers regarding structure power systems, is that
safety issues can be readily deduced. In fact,
safety issues have been discovered one by one, over
more than a century in the case mentioned, in the
work of many thousands of practitioners, and cannot
be deduced by a single individual over a few
decades. A knowledge of the literature, the
standards and custom in a field is a critical part
of safety engineering. A combination of theory and
track record of practices is involved, and track
record indicates some of the areas of theory that
are relevant. (In the USA, persons with a state
license in Professional Engineering in Electrical
Engineering are expected to be competent in this
regard, the foregoing notwithstanding, but most
electrical engineers have no need of the license for
their work.)
Safety is often seen as one of a group of related
disciplines: quality, reliability, availability,
maintainability and safety. (Availability is
sometimes not mentioned, on the principle that it is
a simple function of reliability and
maintainability.) These issues tend to determine the
value of any work, and deficits in any of these
areas are considered to result in a cost, beyond the
cost of addressing the area in the first place; good
management is then expected to minimize total cost. |
