System safety concepts costs

The lack of system safety costs millions of dollars in damages and loss of lives every year due to preventable accidents and mishaps. It is my greatest hope that the readers of this book can use the material contained herein to better understand and apply the system safety concept and thereby develop safe products and systems. 

The key to having a cost-effective safety effort is to embed it into a system engineering process starting from early concept development and then to design safety into the system as the design decisions are made. Costs are much less when safety is built into the system design from the beginning rather than added on or retrofitted later. 

To provide cost-effective safety engineering, the system and safety analysis and design process needs to consider the humans in systems—including those that are not directly controlling the physical processes—not separately or after the fact but starting at concept development and continuing throughout the life cycle of the system. 

To start safety engineering early enough to be cost-effective, safety must be considered from the early concept formation stages of development and continue throughout the life cycle of the system. Design decisions should be guided by safety... 

Consequently, prevention and error management programs based on system safety and human factors concepts not only improve safety within the workforce, but are also commercially attractive. As Professor Patrick Hudson, a leading world expert in system safety and human factors has argued, a company safety department or system should be seen as a profit centre, not as a cost centre (Hudson, 1998). 

In this book, two concepts of system safety engineering and risk assessment are combined. System safety engineering is considered a working part of the risk assessment process. Engineers must use system safety engineering analyses to truly understand what causes hazards and how they should be controlled. Risk assessment takes that information and helps the engineer weigh the options and decide which is the most cost-effective. 

A key development in system safety is the ALARP principle that states that the residual risk of a system shall be as low as reasonably practicable (ALARP principle) and was codihed through the UK Health and Safety at Work Act of 1974. The concept asserts that safety-critical systems and operations should be safe as far as reasonably practicable without risks to health and safety. This is important because it forces the overt decision to balance the realized safety benehts to the actual costs to implement in other words, residual risks are tolerable and thus do not need further mitigations. 

SMSs, whether developed for the aerospace, marine, food, or any other industry for that matter, all have certain concepts and elements in common. As explained in detail in Chapter 2, especially Figure 2.2, the safety organization within the SMS must follow a certain process. To refresh your memory, first, understand what you want to do (or protect, i.e., lives, hardware) then identify the hazards in the process analyze the hazards evaluate the risks (including the costs and benefits) control or mitigate the unacceptable risks verify that it is in place and finally, document and periodically review the entire system. The SMS institutionalizes this system safety process. Simply put, if the safety organization does not apply the system safety process, then it is not a viable SMS. 

Look at Figure 2.2 again. You can see that the OSHA standard approaches the SMS much better than it did before, but it still doesn t really give you a way to manage the risk in the system or process. The process hazard analysis clause comes closest to that concept, but it still does not take into account the risks of the systan— it only looks at the hazards. As we remember from Chapter 2, the hazards may be enormous, but the risk may be infinitesimal (e.g., another planet hitting the earth). Risk management is a necessary ingredient in the appropriate use of system safety. That is how you can stiU be safe and keep costs at a reasonable level. 

The aim of the investigations presented here is to propose an adaptation of the signature analysis concept to systems safety, which is original, cost saving and as universal as possible but for which the improvement of the safety level obtained could be globally assessed. The method proposed must be considered as an on-line tool working in realtime, based upon signature analysis. 

The safety concept and design philosophy of RMWR is to provide a high level of safety by implementing a reasonable combination of the active and passive safety features and systems, and to reduce costs by relying on natural circulation for core cooling and by the simplification of safety systems. 

Essentially, every organization and program should always perform the system safety process on every product, process, or system. This is not only to make the system safe but also to prove and verify the system is safe. Safety cannot be achieved by chance. This concept makes obvious sense on large safety-critical systems, but what about small systems that seem naturally safe Again, a system should be proven safe, not just assumed to be safe. An SSP can be tailored in size, cost, and effort through scaling, based on standards, common... 

Abstract. The development of mixed-criticahty systems that integrate applications of different criticality levels (safety, security, real-time and non-real time) in a single embedded system can provide multiple benefits such as product cost-size-weight reduction, reliability increase and scalability. However, the integration of applications of different levels of criticality in a single embedded system leads to several challenges with respect to safety certification standards. This research paper describes a safety concept for a fail-safe wind turbine mixed-criticality control system based on multicore partitioning that meets IEC-61508 and ISO-13849 industrial safety standards. The safety concept has been positively assessed by a certification body. 

Based on the overall system features, including capability, reliability, deliverability, cost and safety, the direct gas reactor concept was recommended to NR headquarters for approval. NR headquarters approved the recommendation. The gas reactor system appears capable of fulfilling the mission requirements for the envisioned NEP missions, simplifies engineering development testing, and offers the fewest hurdles to development. 

Criticism is often levelled at the authorities regarding the cost of safety certification. While this, in some cases, is justified, the constructors do not always make life as easy in this respect as they could. The concepts of Certification by Design and Design for Certification should be borne in mind since they offer a way not only towards optimising the certification process but also improving the system design and hence reducing costs. 

In order to reflect these lead times, the concept of a timestamp is introduced. Timestamp is used in computer science documenting the system time when a certain event or transaction occurs e.g. for logging events (N.N. 2007). In the context of future inventory value planning, the time-stamp marks the period, when the first raw material has reached a certain stage in the value chain network included into a specific product. In the example illustrated in fig. 57, the raw material is processed in the same period to be converted into product 1. Therefore, all four value chain steps indexed from one to four occur in the same period and have the same time-stamp one. Conversion into product 2, however, requires additional time caused by production lead times, safety inventory and/or transportation time, that the steps indexed with five and six have a time stamp of two. The timestamp reflects that the inventory value of product 2 is not based on the raw material costs from the same period but based on the raw material costs from the previous period in order to reflect the lead time. Consequently, value chain indices and timestamps are defined for all steps and can cover multiple periods reflecting that raw materials in a global complex multi-stage value chain network can take several months, until they are sold as part of a finished product to the market. 

Essential medicines are those that satisfy the priority health care needs of the population. They are selected with due regard to public health relevance, evidence on efficacy and safety, and comparative cost effectiveness. Essential medicines are intended to be available within the context of functioning health systems at all times in adequate amounts, in the appropriate dosage forms, with assured quahty and adequate information, and at a price the individual and the community can afford. The implementation of the concept of essential medicines is intended to be flexible and adaptable to many different situations exactly which medicines are regarded as essential remain a national responsibility... 

Castable Polyurethane Elastomers explains the production process of polyurethane components from both the theoretical and practical points of view. It describes the underlying concepts for the raw material supplier recommendations and explains how to achieve application-specific properties in polyurethane. The book explains the production of prepolymers with special focus on health and safety issues. It presents the different types of methods available on both the micro and macro levels and explains the rationale behind choosing the system needed to create a cost-effective, application-specific product. 

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