Safety and Reliability: Co-operative and Complementary
Safety cases may be undertaken for a number of different reasons. These reasons may include legal compliance or defence against negligence, good business practice such as highlighting potential risks, or for insurance offsets. The audience for the Safety Case must completely understood to ensure that it addresses the needs of the audience.
Safety Cases have become an essential part of doing business e.g. NOPSA, Defence projects Major Hazardous Facilities etc. In particular, a safety ace is required for the establishment or major changes to Facilities. While qualitative based risk assessment may form part of a Safety Case, without real numbers from reliability studies the Safety Case is wholly subjective and is gut feelings and guess.
Safety and reliability are usually handled by different parts of the organisation; however, the techniques and outputs are similar – it’s your point of view that differs. This paper explores the development of safety cases and how the quality of the Safety Case can be improved using the same tools of reliability. The tools of reliability and in common with safety include Fault Tree Analysis, FMECA (and its little brother FMEA) and Event Tree Analysis. In addition, system modelling used for in the development of Reliability Block Diagrams can also assist in the development of the Safety Case
This presentation leads through the development of a goal-based, simplified Safety Case linking the Safety Case artefacts to reliability products.
Author Bio: Roy Ivey
Roy is a qualified professional engineer with post graduate qualifications in Computer Science, Disaster Management and Reliability. Roy has extensive experience is defence projects including air and naval projects. He has also been involved in emergency management systems both in Australia and New Zealand.
Roy is currently leading the development of the Safety Case for the Air Warfare Destroyer project.
