Journal of System Safety
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Artificial Intelligence (AI) - The Need for New Safety Standards and Methodologies
Get PDFThere have been a series of challenges in developing appropriate safety standards and methodologies as technology evolves to ensure their safe implementation. These challenges, which fi rst arose at the dawn of the industrial revolution, will inevitably continue. New technologies will always forge ahead in a competitive marketplace; failure to do so will inevitably lead to organizational demise. However, these developments must be matched by a complement of research activity seeking to ensure that appropriate new safety standards and methodologies are put in place to maintain acceptable levels of risk. A new challenge now confronts us in the form of artifi cial intelligence (AI), where we stand at the frontiers of decision making in relation to what roles machines and humans should play in optimal decision making and how this will impact safety
President's Message: Conversion
No full textISSS conversion is an ongoing process. Our virtual conference delivered more than 70 hours of content and was attended by more than 160 people. Three keynote speakers sketched out where we’ve been, and where we are going, as a profession. Roundtables and workshops began dissecting the bits and pieces we will need to embrace, examine and moderate to move into our next-level 21st-century practices
System Safety in Healthcare: Quality Improvement Methods in Healthcare: Good Practices and Bad Practices
No full textA Johns Hopkins study in 2018 claims that more than 250,000 people in the United States die every year from medical errors. Other reports claim the numbers to be as high as 440,000. At that time, medical errors are the third-leading cause of death, after heart disease and cancer.
Hospitals make more money when they make mistakes, and reducing mistakes could actually cut into a hospital’s profits, according to a study by the managing director at the Boston Consulting Group, reported in The New York Times. This article shows very profitable examples of the good, as well as bad, practice of medicine
Tips and Lessons Learned for Conducting Safety Review Board Meetings
Get PDFAt some point during a safety program’s lifecycle, presenting to an Independent Safety Review Board is likely. For the program representatives, including their safety lead, program manager, and supporting representatives (e.g., design engineers, software developers, test directors, etc.), this could be comparable to a full-scale audit on their program - and in some cases, it is! The fear that program representatives have with presenting to Safety Review Boards is the unknown. They may ask themselves:
What is going to be uncovered, or discovered?
Will they be able to provide sufficient responses to address questions and concerns and defend our safety assessments?
Will the Safety Review Board process delay the schedule?
Are they going to miss a test event milestone?
Will they make their Critical Design Review (CDR)?
Will they meet their certification process?
How much is this going to cost?
Why do they need to provide all of this Objective Quality Evidence (OQE)?
This paper provides tips and highlights what programs should do, and should not do, based on lessons learned to have successful Safety Review Board meetings. The end goal of any successful Safety Review Board meeting is to ensure the safety program processes and analytical artifacts are adequate and well-established to properly identify and assess safety risks for the personnel, equipment and environment that will be exposed to potential hazards during the system’s lifecycle
Covid-19
Get PDFMuch has been said in the popular press about the world-wide COrnaVIrus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Some of this information is accurate, some is exaggerated. In some cases vital information has not been presented, while other information is simply wrong. As business activity resumes in the U.S. and other countries, occupational health and safety personnel will have to make some extremely difficult decisions. Those decisions will have to be based on a thorough understanding of the scientific facts and not fear, partial information or distortions. So, what are the facts? What is a coronavirus? How does it work? How did it get that name? Where did it come from? How does it spread? Is there any way to stop it? Do masks work? What about social distancing, hand sanitizers and hand washing? What do the coronavirus statistics mean? Can a vaccine be made? Does post-infection therapy work, and is it safe? Does vitamin C and zinc do anything, or is it just a hoax? These are some of the questions that will be addressed in this article
From the Editor's Desk: Principles
No full textA few people pointed out that there were some events at our recent International System Safety Conference (ISSC) that included some excellent discussions that were not documented with slides or papers. This is often the case with panels and roundtables. There was concern that important principles were discussed and might be lost. It is now my understanding that, at least in one case, there will be an effort to create a paper to provide some documentation
Virtual Button and Graphical Interface System Safety Evaluation using System Theoretic Process Analysis (STPA)
Get PDFSystem Theoretic Process Analysis (STPA) is an extremely valuable methodology, especially when used early in a system’s concept phase, for effective and efficient development of safety requirements that address potential safety issues associated with human machine interactions.
This paper outlines how STPA can be used to explore potential safety concerns associated with interactions between human operators and virtual buttons within graphical interfaces across the planned operational scenarios and expected system behaviors. Appropriately validated system safety requirements can be developed based on this exploratory effort.
The paper shows how STPA includes drivers and operators as system elements within the control structure where these humans are expected to interact with a “system/feature of interest” by means of virtual buttons presented in a graphical interface. The inclusion of humans as elements of the control structure enables a representation of the human as a “human controller” and, as such, enables STPA evaluation techniques to be applied to them just as these techniques would be applied to any “control” element in a control structure
From the Editor's Desk: COVID-19
No full textRight now, we continue to observe the government response to a dangerous hazard — the COVID-19 virus. Every aspect of this matter is commented on by an array of self-proclaimed experts. This certainly is an interesting risk analysis and risk management problem. There has been much discussion in the International System Safety Society (ISSS) about model-based systems engineering (MBSE) for the last few years, and this tool would seem to be highly applicable to the COVID-19
Applying Safety Concepts and Principles in Vital Controller Design
Get PDFA vital controller is safety critical and its failures, if not mitigated in time, can contribute to hazards in the application system. With electronics advancing and automation increasing, the expanding complexity of a vital controller creates challenges in designing it and assessing its safety integrity level. Typically, traditional safety engineering approaches are not effective for providing systematic guidance to design vital controllers and also not cost efficient for justifying their safety integrity. Through practice on developing multiple Communications-Based Train Control systems, we have identified an approach to using a set of safety concepts as guidance for both safety critical controller design and its safety integrity assessment. These safety concepts are categorized as intrinsic fail-safe, reactive fail-safe, and composite fail-safe. An effective combination of them is applying the composite fail-safe concept in checked redundancy techniques for designing the architecture of a controller, the reactive safety concept for identifying self-testing and monitoring mechanisms in each checked redundant channel, and the intrinsic fail-safe concept for ensuring safe interfaces to other controllers and controlled devices. This paper presents the approach for using these safety concepts and discusses their application principles and verification factors for achieving high safety integrity level of a controller
President's Message: Exciting Times for the ISSS
No full textIt’s the new year, a new decade, and we’ve turned the page as an organization. We’ve completed our contracting process and have a new staff!
We’ve contracted with Ewald Consulting to provide association management services. Under this new arrangement, we will benefit by having professional staff available to help plan our annual Conference and events, provide enhanced member services and assist the Society’s leadership in moving strategic initiatives forward. Ewald Consulting is charter accredited by the Association Management Companies Institute (AMC Institute) and charter certified by the American Society of Association Executives (ASAE)