Traditional safety engineering

The first perspective is the traditional safety engineering approach (Section 2.4). This stresses the individual factors that give rise to accidents and hence emphasizes selection, together with motivational and disciplinary approaches to accident and error reduction. The main emphasis here is on behavior modification, through persuasion (motivational campaigns) or pimishment. The main area of application of this approach has been to occupational safety, which focuses on hazards that affect the individual worker, rather than process safety, which emphasizes major systems failures that could cause major plant losses and impact to the environment as well as individual injury. 

Traditional Safety Engineering approach (control of error by motivational, behavioral, and attitude change) Occupational safety Manual operations Selection Behavior change via motivational campaigns Rewards/punishment Very common... 

THE TRADITIONAL SAFETY ENGINEERING APPROACH TO ACCIDENTS AND HUMAN ERROR... 

The traditional safety engineering approach to accident causation focuses on the individual rather than the system causes of error. Errors are primarily seen as being due to causes such as lack of motivation to behave safely, lack of discipline or lack of knowledge of what constitutes safe behavior. These are assumed to give rise to "unsafe acts." These unsafe acts, in combination with "unsafe situations" (e.g., imguarded plant, toxic substances) are seen as the major causes of accidents. 

I.I. The Traditional Safety Engineering (TSE) View The traditional safety engineering view is the most commonly held of these models in the CPI (and most other industries). As discussed in Chapter 1, this view assumes that human error is primarily controllable by the individual, in that people can choose to behave safely or otherwise. Unsafe behavior is assumed to be due to carelessness, negligence, and to the deliberate breaking of operating rules and procedures designed to protect the individual and the system from known risks. 

Traditional Safety Engineering A safety management policy that emphasizes individual responsibility for system safety and the control of error by the use of motivational campaigns and punishment. 

Safety engineers are now encouraged to use fault prevention techniques (e.g. through the publication of [MOD 91]), in particular the use of formal methods to the development of safety-critical software. To maximise the benefit of this approach the safety engineer would be wise to adopt the security principles of the "reference monitor concept" and security policy modelling. However, as in the case of security, the safety engineer would also be wise to utilise the more traditional safety engineering approach of fault tolerance in harmony with the new fault preventative approach. 

---