Principles of engineering safety: Risk and uncertainty reduction

This article provides a systematised account of safety engineering practices that clarifies their relation to the goal of safety engineering, namely to increase safety. We list 24 principles referred to in the literature of safety engineering, dividing them into four major categories: Inherently safe design, Safety reserves, Safe fail and Procedural safeguards. It emerges from this systematisation that important aspects of these methods can be better understood with the help of the distinction between risk and uncertainty.

[1]  Dennis P. Nolan.  Handbook of Fire and Explosion Protection Engineering Principles: for Oil, Gas, Chemical and Related Facilities , 1997 .

[2]  Bernard L Cohen.  Probabilistic risk analysis for a high-level radioactive waste repository. , 2003, Risk analysis : an official publication of the Society for Risk Analysis.

[3]  Nicholas J. Bahr.  System Safety Engineering And Risk Assessment: A Practical Approach , 1997 .

[4]  B. D. Finetti.  La prévision : ses lois logiques, ses sources subjectives , 1937 .

[5]  S. Hansson,et al.  Safety is more than the antonym of risk , 2006 .

[6]  T.-L. Zhu,et al.  A reliability-based safety factor for aircraft composite structures , 1993 .

[7]  Franz Knoll.  Commentary on the basic philosophy and recent development of safety margins , 1976 .

[8]  Roger M. Cooke,et al.  Probabilistic Risk Analysis: Probabilistic risk analysis , 2001 .

[9]  P. Gärdenfors,et al.  Decision, Probability, and Utility , 1988 .

[10]  L. J. Savage,et al.  The Foundation of Statistics , 1956 .

[11]  Fred Moses.  Problems and prospects of reliability-based optimization , 1997 .

[12]  E. Rowland.  Theory of Games and Economic Behavior , 1946, Nature.

[13]  Willie Hammer,et al.  Product Safety Management And Engineering , 1993 .

[14]  R. Kraus,et al.  Introduction to Safety Engineering , 1985 .

[15]  P. Gärdenfors,et al.  Unreliable probabilities, risk taking, and decision making , 1982, Synthese.

[16]  Yoshinobu Sato,et al.  Estimation of average hazardous-event-frequency for allocation of safety-integrity levels , 1999 .

[17]  Masanobu Shinozuka,et al.  Structural safety & reliability : proceedings of ICOSSAR '93, the 6th International Conference on Structural Safety and Reliability, Innsbruck, Austria, 9-13 August 1993 , 1994 .

[18]  A. E. Green,et al.  High risk safety technology , 1982 .

[19]  P. Gärdenfors,et al.  Bets and beliefs , 1988 .

[20]  Annick Carnino,et al.  Man and risks : technological and human risk prevention , 1990 .

[21]  Richard Wilson.  Risk analysis , 1986, Nature.

[22]  Lars-Åke Johansson,et al.  Safety of distributed machine control systems. , 1996 .

[23]  J. M. Duncan,et al.  Factors of Safety and Reliability in Geotechnical Engineering , 2000 .

[24]  Trevor Kletz.  Plant Design For Safety: A User-Friendly Approach , 1990 .

[25]  H. Bandemer.  Savage, L. J.: Foundations of Statistics. Dover Publ., Inc,. New York 1972. 310 S. , 1974 .

[26]  K. Vind.  A foundation for statistics , 2003 .

[27]  I. Levi.  On Indeterminate Probabilities , 1974 .

[28]  Terje Aven,et al.  Foundations of risk analysis : a knowledge and decision-oriented perspective , 2003 .

[29]  F. Ramsey.  The foundations of mathematics , 1932 .

[30]  Terje Aven,et al.  Perspectives on risk: review and discussion of the basis for establishing a unified and holistic approach , 2005, Reliab. Eng. Syst. Saf..

[31]  D. Ellsberg.  Decision, probability, and utility: Risk, ambiguity, and the Savage axioms , 1961 .

[32]  R. B. Braithwaite.  The Foundations Of Mathematics , 1954 .

[33]  Harold E. Roland,et al.  System Safety Engineering and Management , 1983 .

[34]  Sven Ove Hansson,et al.  Decision Making Under Great Uncertainty , 1996 .

[35]  F. Knight.  The economic nature of the firm: From Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit , 2009 .

[36]  S Salminen.  Safety Analysis: Principles and Practice in Occupational Safety , 2002 .