The most important thing to remember is that system safety engineering is a combination of management and systems engineering practices applied to the evaluation and reduction of risk in a system and its operation. The objective of system safety is to identify hazards resulting from the use or operation of a system and to eliminate or reduce the hazards to an acceptable level of risk.
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The system is the combination or interrelation of hardware, software, people, and the operating environment. In system safety engineering you must look at the system from cradle to grave. In other words, the system life cycle is the design, development, test, production, operation, and retirement (or disposal) of the system.
Some typical hazards in various systems are electrical discharge or shock, fire or explosion, rapid pressure release, and extreme high or low temperature. Of course, a hazard can be the result of a system or component failure, but it isn’t always. Failure and hazard are frequently linked. There is an occupational hazard (no pun intended to ) associating the two.
A hazard can exist without anything failing. In other words, an engineer can actually (unintentionally of course) “design” in a hazard. To be successful in system safety engineering we must look not only at failures and their associated hazards but also at the normal system operation and its hazards.
There are risks always. There is a risk staying in bed and a different risk getting out of bed. As much as we would love to have zero risk, that is a practical impossibility. Because we cannot totally eliminate risk, we try to shrink it as much as possible. This can be done by lowering either the probability or the severity of the hazard, or both.