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A thematic approach to system safety
Author(s) -
Ekman Mark E.,
Werner Paul W.,
Covan John M.,
D'Antonio Perry E.
Publication year - 1998
Publication title -
process safety progress
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.378
H-Index - 40
eISSN - 1547-5913
pISSN - 1066-8527
DOI - 10.1002/prs.680170312
Subject(s) - safer , safety assurance , process (computing) , system safety , engineering , systems engineering , risk analysis (engineering) , engineering design process , computer science , reliability engineering , computer security , mechanical engineering , medicine , operating system
Abstract Sandia National Laboratories (Sandia) has refined a process for developing inherently safer system designs based on methods used by Sandia to design detonation safety into nuclear weapons. The process was created when Sandia realized that standard engineering practices did not provide the level of safety assurance necessary for nuclear weapon operations, with their potential for catastrophic accidents. A systematic approach, which relies on mutually supportive design principles integrated through fundamental physical principles, was developed to ensure a predictably safe system response under a variety of operational and accident‐based stesses. Robust, safe system designs result from this thematic approach to safety, minimizing the number of safety critical features. This safety assurance process has two profound benefits: the process avoids the need to understand or limit the ultimate intensity of off‐normal environments and it avoids the requirement to analyze and test a large array of accident environment scenarios (e.g., directional threats, sequencing of environments, time races, etc) to demonstrate conformance to all safety requirements.