In this series of posts, I will take you through a suite of safety analysis tasks. They are designed to deal with a complex system, but can be simplified (known as ‘tailoring’). I start with Preliminary Hazard Identification and work through detailed analyses, each with a different point of view of the system.
Every approach to safety has a context that needs to be understood to get the best results. I have used the Tasks from a system safety engineering standard called Military-Standard-882E, or Mil-Std-882 for short. This has been around for a long time and is very widely used. It was developed for use on US military systems, but it has found its way, sometimes in disguise, into many other programs around the world.
However, any safety analysis standard can be applied blindly – it is not a substitute for competent decision making. So, I explain the limitations with each Task and how to overcome them.