Safety engineering is about showing, with evidence, that the hazards a system could create have been found, reduced as far as is reasonable and kept under control through design, construction, handover and operation. It draws on hazard identification, safety requirements, integrity targets and a clear legal test for when risk is low enough.
This hub is for systems, safety and project engineers who need to run a hazard log, write safety requirements or build an assurance case. It starts with the core ideas, then covers safety integrity levels and progressive assurance, residual risk and its transfer at handover, safety on construction projects, and the growing overlap between safety and cyber security in connected systems.
Integrity targets say how reliable a safety function must be, and progressive assurance builds the evidence as the project goes.
Some risk always remains, and it has to be handed from builder to operator knowingly.
Construction sites carry their own hazards and their own expectations for safety assurance.
In connected systems a security breach can become a safety failure, so the two must be engineered together.
Related hubs: reliability, availability and maintainability (RAMS), requirements engineering, systems engineering. See also: RAMS and safety, FMECA, operational readiness and handover.
A modern car, factory line or medical device is no longer just a physical system — it is a computer wrapped in metal, connected to a network. That connection is a feature and a threat: every link is a way in. Designing safe and secure cyber-physical systems means engineering safety and security together from the…
On a construction project, “we think it’s safe” is not good enough — you have to be able to prove it, to regulators, to clients, and to the people on site. Safety assurance is the structured process of demonstrating, with evidence, that a project’s safety risks have been identified and properly controlled. It is the…
Safety Assurance activities are fundamental components of any effective Safety Management System (SMS). These activities involve systematic and ongoing monitoring, recording, and evaluation of an organization’s safety performance and safety management processes to ensure that the SMS is operating according to expectations and requirements. At its core, Safety Assurance is about making sure that safety…
In the dynamic field of project management, successful project delivery does not mark the end but rather a transition to continuous stewardship. Upon completing a construction project, it must be handed over to the operator and maintainer who will assume responsibility for its ongoing operation. While risk transfer plays a vital role in mitigating risks…
Some systems exist for one reason: to stop a disaster. The emergency shutdown on a chemical reactor, the brakes on a train, the protection layer on an oil terminal. Safety Integrity Level (SIL) is the measure of how much you can trust one of those safety functions to actually work the moment it is finally…
Every safety-critical project keeps a list it hopes it will never have to prove it kept — until an auditor, or worse an accident, asks to see it. A hazard log is a living record of every hazard a system could pose, what is being done about each one, and the evidence that the risk…
Two acronyms quietly decide how much money and effort a project must spend to make something safe — and confusing them has real legal consequences. SFAIRP (So Far As Is Reasonably Practicable) and ALARP (As Low As Reasonably Practicable) are both safety principles about reducing risk to a reasonable level — but they are not…
A construction site is one of the most dangerous workplaces there is — not because the work is reckless, but because the hazards are everywhere and constantly changing. Building safety means systematically identifying, assessing, and controlling the hazards on a construction project — falls, plant, electricity, materials, and more — so people go home safe….
