Each year the Safety-critical Systems Symposium brings together practitioners and researchers in a quest to inculcate a higher degree of safety engineering into the development and operation of critical software-based systems. On this, the Symposium's seventh occasion, it explores recent work and experience which lead us further 'towards system safety'. This book of the Proceedings covers the entire event. The first paper is the course text of a tutorial run on the first day of the Symposium, included here to provide readers with a coverage of the entire event. The next fourteen papers were presented, on the second and third days, in six sessions: Safety Cases, Systems Engineering, Safety Analysis and Safety Integrity, Tools for Software Safety, Solving Safety Problems, and Qllestions and Competences. Eight of the fourteen papers were authored in industry, four in universities, and two in other research establishments. Four of them report on work outside the UK: in France, Germany, Norway and Brazil. There are three papers on safety cases, each taking a different perspective. Skogstad from Norway and Boyce and Hamilton of GEC-Marconi both report on experience in the field, the former in attempting to apply European norms to project documentation and the latter in attempting to build up a retrospective safety case. The third paper, by Goodman, takes a more philosophical stance, examining the lack of useful measurement in safety assurance.

Experts estimate that as many as 98,000 people die in any given year from medical errors that occur in hospitals. That's more than die from motor vehicle accidents, breast cancer, or AIDSâ€"three causes that receive far more public attention. Indeed, more people die annually from medication errors than from workplace injuries. Add the financial cost to the human tragedy, and medical error easily rises to the top ranks of urgent, widespread public problems. To Err Is Human breaks the silence that has surrounded medical errors and their consequenceâ€"but not by pointing fingers at caring health care professionals who make honest mistakes. After all, to err is human. Instead, this book sets forth a national agendaâ€"with state and local implicationsâ€"for reducing medical errors and improving patient safety through the design of a safer health system. This volume reveals the often startling statistics of medical error and the disparity between the incidence of error and public perception of it, given many patients' expectations that the medical profession always performs perfectly. A careful examination is made of how the surrounding forces of legislation, regulation, and market activity influence the quality of care provided by health care organizations and then looks at their handling of medical mistakes. Using a detailed case study, the book reviews the current understanding of why these mistakes happen. A key theme is that legitimate liability concerns discourage reporting of errorsâ€"which begs the question, "How can we learn from our mistakes?" Balancing regulatory versus market-based initiatives and public versus private efforts, the Institute of Medicine presents wide-ranging recommendations for improving patient safety, in the areas of leadership, improved data collection and analysis, and development of effective systems at the level of direct patient care. To Err Is Human asserts that the problem is not bad people in health careâ€"it is that good people are working in bad systems that need to be made safer. Comprehensive and straightforward, this book offers a clear prescription for raising the level of patient safety in American health care. It also explains how patients themselves can influence the quality of care that they receive once they check into the hospital. This book will be vitally important to federal, state, and local health policy makers and regulators, health professional licensing officials, hospital administrators, medical educators and students, health caregivers, health journalists, patient advocatesâ€"as well as patients themselves. First in a series of publications from the Quality of Health Care in America, a project initiated by the Institute of Medicine

System safety is the application of engineering and management principles, criteria, and techniques to optimize safety within the constraints of operational effectiveness, time, and cost throughout all phases of the system life cycle. System safety is to safety as systems engineering is to engineering. When performing appropriate analysis, the evaluation is performed holistically by tying into systems engineering practices and ensuring that system safety has an integrated system-level perspective.The NASA System Safety Handbook presents the overall framework for System Safety and provides the general concepts needed to implement the framework. The treatment addresses activities throughout the system life cycle to assure that the system meets safety performance requirements and is as safe as reasonably practicable.This handbook is intended for project management and engineering teams and for those with review and oversight responsibilities. It can be used both in a forward-thinking mode to promote the development of safe systems, and in a retrospective mode to determine whether desired safety objectives have been achieved.The topics covered in this volume include general approaches for formulating a hierarchy of safety objectives, generating a corresponding hierarchical set of safety claims, characterizing the system safety activities needed to provide supporting evidence, and presenting a risk-informed safety case that validates the claims. Volume 2, to be completed in 2012, will provide specific guidance on the conduct of the major system safety activities and the development of the evidence.

Plant Hazard Analysis and Safety Instrumentation Systems is the first book to combine coverage of these two integral aspects of running a chemical processing plant. It helps engineers from various disciplines learn how various analysis techniques, international standards, and instrumentation and controls provide layers of protection for basic process control systems, and how, as a result, overall system reliability, availability, dependability, and maintainability can be increased. This step-by-step guide takes readers through the development of safety instrumented systems, also including discussions on cost impact, basics of statistics, and reliability. Swapan Basu brings more than 35 years of industrial experience to this book, using practical examples to demonstrate concepts. Basu links between the SIS requirements and process hazard analysis in order to complete SIS lifecycle implementation and covers safety analysis and realization in control systems, with up-to-date descriptions of modern concepts, such as SIL, SIS, and Fault Tolerance to name a few. In addition, the book addresses security issues that are particularly important for the programmable systems in modern plants, and discusses, at length, hazardous atmospheres and their impact on electrical enclosures and the use of IS circuits. - Helps the reader identify which hazard analysis method is the most appropriate (covers ALARP, HAZOP, FMEA, LOPA) - Provides tactics on how to implement standards, such as IEC 61508/61511 and ANSI/ISA 84 - Presents information on how to conduct safety analysis and realization in control systems and safety instrumentation

This report takes stock of recent developments and initiatives to meet increasingly ambitious road safety targets, and constitutes a major international review of progress in developing Safe System approaches, now adopted in a small number of countries.

Progress in space safety lies in the acceptance of safety design and engineering as an integral part of the design and implementation process for new space systems. Safety must be seen as the principle design driver of utmost importance from the outset of the design process, which is only achieved through a culture change that moves all stakeholders toward front-end loaded safety concepts. This approach entails a common understanding and mastering of basic principles of safety design for space systems at all levels of the program organisation. Fully supported by the International Association for the Advancement of Space Safety (IAASS), written by the leading figures in the industry, with frontline experience from projects ranging from the Apollo missions, Skylab, the Space Shuttle and the International Space Station, this book provides a comprehensive reference for aerospace engineers in industry. It addresses each of the key elements that impact on space systems safety, including: the space environment (natural and induced); human physiology in space; human rating factors; emergency capabilities; launch propellants and oxidizer systems; life support systems; battery and fuel cell safety; nuclear power generators (NPG) safety; habitat activities; fire protection; safety-critical software development; collision avoidance systems design; operations and on-orbit maintenance. - The only comprehensive space systems safety reference, its must-have status within space agencies and suppliers, technical and aerospace libraries is practically guaranteed - Written by the leading figures in the industry from NASA, ESA, JAXA, (et cetera), with frontline experience from projects ranging from the Apollo missions, Skylab, the Space Shuttle, small and large satellite systems, and the International Space Station - Superb quality information for engineers, programme managers, suppliers and aerospace technologists; fully supported by the IAASS (International Association for the Advancement of Space Safety)

This book presents approaches to address key challenges based on a vehicle level view and with a special emphasis on Drive-by-Wire systems. The design and testing of modern vehicle electronics are becoming more and more demanding due to increasing interdependencies among components and the safety criticality of tasks. The development towards Drive-by-Wire functionalities in vehicles with multiple actuators for vehicle control further increases the challenge. The book explicitly takes into account the interactions between components and aims at bridging the gap between the need to generate additional customer benefits and the effort to achieve functional safety. The book follows a twofold approach: on the one side, it presents a toolchain to support efficient further development of novel functionalities for Drive-by-Wire vehicles. The toolchain comprises appropriate software tools and scaled and full-scale experimental vehicles. On the other side, development towards functionally safe and flexible Drive-by-Wire vehicles is addressed by proposing a top-down designed architecture for vehicle electronics that is enabled by suitable mechanisms. The resulting goal achievement with regard to functional safety is evaluated based on a novel hierarchical approach.

The rapid development of new technologies in the industry of the future implies a major evolution in the industrial safety measures needed to be met, such as societal requirements. Towards Process Safety 4.0 in the Factory of the Future presents the concept of Safety 4.0 from the point of view of process safety, occupational safety and health, as well as systems’ cyber security. Numerous examples illustrate the different approaches of the identified methods and techniques of Safety 4.0. Their concepts, paradigms, structural bases, couplings, complexities and flaws are systematically analyzed. This comprehensive approach to Safety 4.0 is aimed at the wide variety of actors working in the industry of the future.

This Round Table examines the contribution economic analysis can make to improving security in aviation and maritime shipping by quantifying the benefits of security measures and assessing their effectiveness, and examining techniques to allocate resources to target the highest risks.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the First Automotive Software Workshop, ASWD 2004, held in San Diego, CA, USA in January 2004. The 10 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 26 lectures held at the workshop that brought together experts from industry and academia, working on highly complex, distributed, reactive software systems related to the automotive domain.