Overview
Ideally, safety-engineers take an early design of a system, analyze it to find what faults can occur, and then propose safety requirements in design specifications up front and changes to existing systems to make the system safer. In an early design stage, often a fail-safe system can be made acceptably safe with a few sensors and some software to read them. Probabilistic fault-tolerant systems can often be made by using more, but smaller and less-expensive pieces of equipment.
Far too often, rather than actually influencing the design, safety engineers are assigned to prove that an existing, completed design is safe. If a safety engineer then discovers significant safety problems late in the design process, correcting them can be very expensive. This type of error has the potential to waste large sums of money.
The exception to this conventional approach is the way some large government agencies approach safety engineering from a more proactive and proven process perspective, known as "system safety". The system safety philosophy is to be applied to complex and critical systems, such as commercial airliners, complex weapon systems, spacecraft, rail and transportation systems, air traffic control system and other complex and safety-critical industrial systems. The proven system safety methods and techniques are to prevent, eliminate and control hazards and risks through designed influences by a collaboration of key engineering disciplines and product teams. Software safety is a fast growing field since modern systems functionality are increasingly being put under control of software. The whole concept of system safety and software safety, as a subset of systems engineering, is to influence safety-critical systems designs by conducting several types of hazard analyses to identify risks and to specify design safety features and procedures to strategically mitigate risk to acceptable levels before the system is certified.
Additionally, failure mitigation can go beyond design recommendations, particularly in the area of maintenance. There is an entire realm of safety and reliability engineering known as Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM), which is a discipline that is a direct result of analyzing potential failures within a system and determining maintenance actions that can mitigate the risk of failure. This methodology is used extensively on aircraft and involves understanding the failure modes of the serviceable replaceable assemblies in addition to the means to detect or predict an impending failure. Every automobile owner is familiar with this concept when they take in their car to have the oil changed or brakes checked. Even filling up one's car with fuel is a simple example of a failure mode (failure due to fuel exhaustion), a means of detection (fuel gauge), and a maintenance action (filling the car's fuel tank).
For large scale complex systems, hundreds if not thousands of maintenance actions can result from the failure analysis. These maintenance actions are based on conditions (e.g., gauge reading or leaky valve), hard conditions (e.g., a component is known to fail after 100 hrs of operation with 95% certainty), or require inspection to determine the maintenance action (e.g., metal fatigue). The RCM concept then analyzes each individual maintenance item for its risk contribution to safety, mission, operational readiness, or cost to repair if a failure does occur. Then the sum total of all the maintenance actions are bundled into maintenance intervals so that maintenance is not occurring around the clock, but rather, at regular intervals. This bundling process introduces further complexity, as it might stretch some maintenance cycles, thereby increasing risk, but reduce others, thereby potentially reducing risk, with the end result being a comprehensive maintenance schedule, purpose built to reduce operational risk and ensure acceptable levels of operational readiness and availability.
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