This course is not currently offered, please contact the school or faculty of your program.

Module description

System safety relates to all aspects of the safety of a system across its whole life cycle which includes design, installation, commissioning, operations, decommissioning, and relinquishment. The module adopts a socio-technical approach to prospectively, through risk assessment, analyse and improve system safety implications associated with people, plant and procedural processes and the interactions between them.

This foundations course covers past, present and emerging influences on system safety. It has been designed to help understand identify and address system safety risks across sectors where the system complexity and/or the adoption of automation is increasing. It covers how to apply leading inherently safer design, defence in depth layers of control, and human factors approaches in systems safety engineering. It also covers safety management and governance requirements associated with risk assessments. Specific techniques studied include: Hazard and Operability Studies (HAZOP), Functional Failure Analysis (FFA), Fault Tree Analysis (FTA), Event Tree Analysis (ETA), Failure Modes Effects and Criticality Analysis (FMECA), Bowtie Analysis, LOPA, ConSupMap and Safer.