Tag: Mil-std-882-Training

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Mil-Std-882E Safety Analysis

System Hazard Analysis with Mil-Std-882E

In this 45-minute session, I look at System Hazard Analysis with Mil-Std-882E. SHA is Task 205 in the Standard. I explore Task 205’s aim, description, scope, and contracting requirements.

I also provide commentary, based on working with this Standard since 1996, which explains SHA. How to use it to complement Sub-System Hazard Analysis (SSHA, Task 204). How to get the maximum benefits from your System Safety Program.

Using Task 205 effectively is not just a matter of applying it in number order with the other Tasks. We need to use it within the Systems Engineering framework. That means using it top-down, to set requirements, and bottom-up to verify that they are met.

This is the seven-minute-long demo. The full video is 47 minutes long.
get the course ‘system safety in
systems engineering’: click here

System Hazard Analysis: Topics

  • Task 205 Purpose [differences vs. 204];
    • Verify subsystem compliance;
    • ID hazards (subsystem interfaces and faults);
    • ID hazards (integrated system design); and
    • Recommend necessary actions.
  • Task Description (five slides);
  • Reporting;
  • Contracting; and
  • Commentary.

Transcript: System Hazard Analysis with Mil-Std-882E

Introduction

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Safety Artisan, where you will find professional, pragmatic, and impartial safety training resources and videos. I’m Simon, your host, and I’m recording this on the 13th of April 2020. And given the circumstances when I record this, I hope this finds you all well.

System Hazard Analysis Task 205

Let’s get on to our topic for today, which is System Hazard Analysis. Now, system hazard analysis is, as you may know, Task 205 in the Mil-Std-882E system safety standard.

Topics for this Session

What we’re going to cover in this session is purpose, task description, reporting, contracting, and some commentary – although I’ll be making commentary all the way through. Going back to the top, the yellow highlighting with this (and with Task 204), I’m using the yellow highlighting to indicate differences between 205 and 204 because they are superficially quite similar. And then I’m using underlining to emphasize those things that I want to bring to your attention and emphasize.

Within Task 205, Purpose. We’ve got four purpose slides for this one. Verify subsistent compliance and recommend necessary actions – fourth one there. And then in the middle of the sandwich, we’ve got the identification of hazards, both between the subsystem interfaces and faults from the subsystem propagating upwards to the overall system and identifying hazards in the integrated system design. So, quite a different emphasis to 204, which was thinking about subsystems in isolation. We’ve got five slides of task description, a couple on reporting, one on contracting – nothing new there – and several commentaries.

System Requirements Hazard Analysis (T205)

Let’s get straight on with it. The purpose, as we’ve already said, there is a three-fold purpose here; Verify system compliance, hazard identification, and recommended actions, and then, as we can see in the yellow, the identifying previously unidentified hazards is split into two. Looking at subsystem interfaces and faults and the integration of the overall system design. And you can see the yellow bit, that’s different from 204 where we are taking this much higher-level view, taking an inter-subsystem view and then an integrated view.

Task Description (T205) #1

On to the task description. The contract has got to do it and document, as usual, looking at hazards and mitigations, or controls, in the integrated system design, including software and human interface. We must come onto that later.

All the usual stuff about we’ve got to include COTS, GOTS, GFE, and NDI. So, even if stuff is not being developed, if we’re putting together a jigsaw system from existing pieces, we’ve still got to look at the overall thing. And as with 204, we go down to the underlined text at the bottom of the slide, areas to consider. Think about performance, and degradation of performance, functional failures, timing and design errors, defects, inadvertent functioning – that classic functional failure analysis that we’ve seen before.

Again, while conducting this analysis, we’ve got to include human beings as an integral component of the system, receiving inputs, and initiating outputs.  Human factors were included in this standard from long ago…

The End

You can find a free pdf of the System Safety Engineering Standard, Mil-Std-882E, here.

Learn safety engineering with me, an industry professional with 25 years of experience, I have:

•Worked on aircraft, ships, submarines, ATMS, trains, and software;

•Tiny programs to some of the biggest (Eurofighter, Future Submarine);

•In the UK and Australia, on US and European programs;

•Taught safety to hundreds of people in the classroom, and thousands online;

•Presented on safety topics at several international conferences.

Categories
Mil-Std-882E Safety Analysis software safety

Functional Hazard Analysis with Mil-Std-882E

In this video, I look at Functional Hazard Analysis with Mil-Std-882E (FHA, which is Task 208 in Mil-Std-882E). FHA analyses software, complex electronic hardware, and human interactions. I explore the aim, description, and contracting requirements of this Task, and provide extensive commentary on it. (I refer to other lessons for special techniques for software safety and Human Factors.)

This video, and the related webinar ‘Identify & Analyze Functional Hazards’, deal with an important topic. Programmable electronics and software now run so much of our modern world. They control many safety-related products and services. If they go wrong, they can hurt people.

I’ve been working with software-intensive systems since 1994. Functional hazards are often misunderstood, or overlooked, as they are hidden. However, the accidents that they can cause are very real. If you want to expand your analysis skills beyond just physical hazards, I will show you how.

This is the seven-minute demo; the full version is 40 minutes long.
clikc here to get the course:
Identify & analyze functional hazards

Functional Hazard Analysis: Context

So how do we analyze software safety?

Before we even start, we need to identify those system functions that may impact safety. We can do this by performing a Functional Failure Analysis (FFA) of all system requirements that might credibly lead to human harm.

An FFA looks at functional requirements (the system should do ‘this’ or ‘that’) and examines what could go wrong. What if:

  • The function does not work when needed?
  • The function works when not required?
  • The function works incorrectly? (There may be more than one version of this.)

(A variation of this technique is explained here.)

If the function could lead to a hazard then it is marked for further analysis. This is where we apply the FHA, Task 208.

Functional Hazard Analysis: The Lesson

Topics: Functional Hazard Analysis

  • Task 208 Purpose;
  • Task Description;
  • Update & Reporting
  • Contracting; and
  • Commentary.

Transcript: Functional Hazard Analysis

Introduction

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Safety Artisan; Home of Safety Engineering Training. I’m Simon and today we’re going to be looking at how you analyze the safety of functions of complex hardware and software. We’ll see what that’s all about in just a second.

Functional Hazard Analysis

I’m just going to get to the right page. This, as you can see, functional hazard analysis is Task 208 in Mil. Standard 882E.

Topics for this Session

What we’ve got for today: we have three slides on the purpose of functional hazard analysis, and these are all taken from the standard. We’ve got six slides of task description. That’s the text from the standard plus we’ve got two tables that show you how it’s done from another part of the standard, not from Task 208. Then we’ve got update and recording, another two slides. Contracting, two slides. And five slides of commentary, which again include a couple of tables to illustrate what we’re talking about.

Functional Purpose HA #1

What we’re going to talk about is, as I say, functional hazard analysis. So, first of all, what’s the purpose of it? In classic 882 style, Task 208 is to perform this functional hazard analysis on a system or subsystem or more than one. Again, as with all the other tasks, we use it to identify and classify system functions and the safety consequences of functional failure or malfunction. In other words, hazards.

Now, I should point out at this stage that the standard is focused on malfunctions of the system. In the real world, lots of software-intensive systems cause accidents that have killed people, even when they’re functioning as intended. That’s one of the shortcomings of this Military Standard – it focuses on failure. But even if something performs as specified, either:

  • The specification might be wrong, or
  • The system might do something that the human operator does not expects.

Mil-Std-882E just doesn’t recognize that. So, it’s not very good in that respect. However, bearing that in mind, let’s carry on with looking at the task.

Functional HA Purpose #2

We’re going to look at these consequences in terms of severity – severity only, we’ll come back to that – to identify what they call safety-critical functions, safety-critical items, safety-related functions, and safety-related items. And a quick word on that, I hate the term ‘safety-critical’ because it suggests a sort of binary “Either it’s safety-critical. Yes. Or it’s not safety-critical. No.” And lots of people take that to mean if it’s “safety-critical, no,” then it’s got nothing to do with safety. They don’t recognize that there’s a sliding scale between maximum safety criticality and none whatsoever. And that’s led to a lot of bad thinking and bad behavior over the years where people do everything they can to pretend that something isn’t safety-related by saying, “Oh, it’s not safety-critical, therefore we don’t have to do anything.” And that kind of laziness kills people.

Anyway, moving on. So, we’ve got these SCFs, SCIs, SRFs, SRIs and they’re supposed to be allocated or mapped to a system design architecture. The presumption in this – the assumption in this task is that we’re doing early – We’ll see that later – and that system design, system architecture, is still up for grabs. We can still influence it.

COTS and MOTS Software

Often that is not the case these days. This standard was written many years ago when the military used to buy loads of bespoke equipment and have it all developed from new. That doesn’t happen anymore so much in the military and it certainly doesn’t happen in many other walks of life – But we’ll talk about how you deal with the realities later.

And they’re allocating these functions and these items of interest to hardware, software, and human interfaces. And I should point out, when we’re talking about all that, all these things are complex. Software is complex, human is complex, and we’re talking about complex hardware. So, we’re talking about components where you can’t just say, “Oh, it’s got a reliability of X, and that’s how often it goes wrong” because those types of simple components are only really subject to random failure, that’s not what we’re talking about here.

We’re talking about complex stuff where we’re talking about systematic failure dominating over random, simple hardware failure. So, that’s the focus of this task and what we’re talking about. That’s not explained in the standard, but that’s what’s going on.

Functional HA Purpose #3

Now, our third slide is on purpose; so, we use the FHA to identify the consequences of malfunction, functional failure, or lack of function. As I said just now, we need to do this as early as possible in the systems engineering process to enable us to influence the design. Of course, this is assuming that there is a system engineering process – that’s not always the case. We’ll talk about that at the end as well.

Also, we’re going to identify and document these functions and items and allocate and it says to partition them in the software design architecture. When we say partition, that’s jargon for separating them into independent functions. We’ll see the value of that later on. Then we’re going to identify requirements and constraints to put on the design team to say, “To achieve this allocation in this partitioning, this is what you must do and this is what you must not do”. So again, the assumption is we’re doing this early. There’s a significant amount of bespoke design yet to be done….

Then What?

Once the FFA has identified the required ‘Level or Rigor’, we need to translate that into a suitable software development standard. This might be:

  • RTCA DO-178C (also know as ED-12C) for civil aviation;
  • The US Joint Software System Safety Engineering Handbook (JSSEH) for military systems;
  • IEC 61508 (functional safety) for the process industry;
  • CENELEC-50128 for the rail industry; and
  • ISO 26262 for automotive applications.

Such standards use Safety Integrity Levels (SILs) or Development Assurance Levels (DALs) to enforce appropriate Levels of Rigor. You can learn about those in my course Principles of Safe Software Development.

Meet the Author

My name’s Simon Di Nucci. I’m a practicing system safety engineer, and I have been, for the last 25 years; I’ve worked in all kinds of domains, aircraft, ships, submarines, sensors, and command and control systems, and some work on rail air traffic management systems, and lots of software safety. So, I’ve done a lot of different things!

Categories
Mil-Std-882E Safety Analysis System Safety

Sub-System Hazard Analysis with Mil-Std-882E

In this video lesson, I look at Sub-System Hazard Analysis with Mil-Std-882E (SSHA, which is Task 204). I teach the mechanics of the task, but not just that. I’m using my long experience with this Standard to teach a pragmatic approach to getting the work done.

Task 204 is one of three tasks that integrate tightly in a Systems Engineering framework. (The others are System Hazard Analysis, Task 205, and System of Systems Hazard Analysis, Task 209.) I’ve bundled these lessons together with bonus content here.

SSHA is designed to be used where a formal Sub-System Specification (SSS) has been created. However, an SSS is not essential to perform this Task. The need for SSHA is usually driven by the complexity of the system and/or that sub-system development is contracted out.

Together, we will explore Task 204’s aim, description, scope, and contracting requirements. There’s value-adding commentary, and I explain the issues with SSHA – how to do it well and avoid the pitfalls.

This is the seven-minute demo, the full video is 40-minutes’ long.
buy the bundle here

Topics: Sub-System Hazard Analysis

  • Preamble: Sub-system & System HA.
  • Task 204 Purpose:
    • Verify subsystem compliance;
    • Identify (new) hazards; and
    • Recommend necessary actions.
  • Task Description (six slides);
  • Reporting;
  • Contracting; and
  • Commentary.

Transcript: Sub-System Hazard Analysis

Introduction

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Safety Artisan, where you will find professional, pragmatic, and impartial instruction on all things system safety. I’m Simon – I’m your host for today, as always and it’s the fourth of April 22. With everything that’s going on in the world, I hope that this video finds you safe and well.

Sub-System Hazard Analysis

Let’s move straight on to what we’re going to be doing. We’re going to be talking today about subsystem hazard analysis and this is task 204 under the military standard 882E. Previously we’ve done 201, which was preliminary hazard identification, 202, which is preliminary hazard analysis, and 203, which is safety requirements hazard analysis. And with task 204 and task 205, which is system has analysis, we’re now moving into getting stuck into particular systems that we’re thinking about, whether they be physical systems or intangible. We’re thinking about the system under consideration and I’m really getting into that analysis.

Topics for this Session

So, the topics that we’re going to cover today, I’ve got a little preamble to set things in perspective. We then get into the three purposes of task 204. First, to verify compliance. Secondly, to identify new hazards. And thirdly, to recommend necessary actions. That would be recommended control measures for hazards and risks. We’ve got six slides of task description, a couple of slides on reporting, one on contracting, and then a few slides on some commentary where I put in my tuppence worth and I’ll hopefully add some value to the basic bones of the standard.

It’s worth saying that you’ll notice that subsystem is highlighted in yellow and the reason for that is that the subsystem and system hazard analysis tasks are very, very similar. They’re identical except for certain passages and I’ve highlighted those in yellow. Normally I use a yellow highlighter to emphasize something I want to talk about. This time around, I’m using underlining for that and the yellow is showing you what these are different for subsystem analysis as opposed to system [hazard analysis]. And when you’ve watched both sessions on 204 and 205, I think you’ll see the significance of what I’ve done.

Preamble – Sub-system & System HA

Before we get started, we need to explain the system model that the 882 is assuming. If we look at the left-hand side of the hexagons, we’ve got our system in the center, which we’re considering. Maybe that interfaces with other systems. They work within the operating environment; hence we have the icon of the world, and the system and maybe other systems are there for a purpose. They’re performing some task; they’re doing some function and that’s indicated by the tools. We’re using the system to do something, whatever it might be.

Then as we move to the right-hand side, the system is itself broken down into subsystems. We’ve got a couple here. We’ve got sub-systems A and B and then A further broken down into A1 and A2, for example. There’s some sort of hierarchy of subsystems that are coming together and being integrated to form the overall system. That is the overall picture that I’d like to bear in mind while we’re talking about this. The assumption in the 882, is we’re going to be looking at this subsystem hierarchy bottom upwards, largely. We’ll come on to that.

Sub-System Hazard Analysis (T204)

The purpose of the task, as I’ve said before, it’s threefold. We must verify subsystem compliance with requirements. Requirements to deal with risk and hazards. We must identify previously unidentified hazards that may emerge as we’re working at a lower level now. And we must recommend actions as necessary. Those are further requirements to eliminate all hazards or mitigate associated risks. We’ll keep those three things in mind and that will keep coming up.

[Video continues…]

End: Sub-System Hazard Analysis

My name’s Simon Di Nucci. I’m a practicing system safety engineer, and I have been, for the last 25 years; I’ve worked in all kinds of domains, aircraft, ships, submarines, sensors, and command and control systems, and some work on rail air traffic management systems, and lots of software safety. So, I’ve done a lot of different things!

You can find a free pdf of the System Safety Engineering Standard, Mil-Std-882E, here.

Categories
Mil-Std-882E System Safety

Learn How to Perform System Safety Analysis

Crystal Ball
The Safety Artisan - anticipating risk

In this ‘super post’, we will Learn How to Perform System Safety Analysis. I will show you thirteen lessons that explain each of the ten analysis tasks, the analysis process, and how to combine those tasks into a program!

Follow the links to sample and buy lessons on individual tasks. You can get discount deals on a bundle of three tasks, or all twelve (+bonus)!

Introduction

Military Standard 882, or Mil-Std-882 for short, is one of the most widely used system-safety standards. As the name implies, this standard is used on US military systems, but it has found its way, sometimes in disguise, into many other programs around the world. It’s been around for a long time and is now in its fifth incarnation: 882E.

Unfortunately, 882 has also been widely misunderstood and misapplied. This is probably not the fault of the standard and is just another facet of its popularity. The truth is that any standard can be applied blindly – no standard is a substitute for competent decision-making.

In this series of posts, we will: provide awareness of this standard; explain how to use it; and discuss how to manage, tailor, and implement it. Links to each training session and to each section of the standard are provided in the following sections.

Mil-Std-882E Training Sessions

System Safety Process, full post here

Photo by Bonneval Sebastien on Unsplash

In this full-length (50 minutes) video, you will learn to:

  • Know the system safety process according to Mil-Std-882E;
  • List and order the eight elements;
  • Understand how they are applied;
  • Skilfully apply system safety using realistic processes; and
  • Feel more confident dealing with multiple standards.

In System Safety Process, we look a the general requirements of Mil-Std-882E. We cover the Applicability of the 882E tasks; the General requirements; the Process with eight elements; and the application of process theory to the real world.

Design Your System Safety Analysis Program

Photo by Christina Morillo from Pexels

Learn how to Design a System Safety Program for any system in any application.

Learning Objectives. At the end of this course, you will be able to:

  • Define what a risk analysis program is;
  • List the hazard analysis tasks that make up a program;
  • Select tasks to meet your needs; and
  • Design a tailored risk analysis program for any application.

This lesson is also available as part of the twelve+one-lesson bundle (see the bottom of this post).

Analysis: 200-series Tasks

Preliminary Hazard Identification, Task 201

Identify Hazards.

In this video, we find out how to create a Preliminary Hazard List, the first step in safety assessment. We look at three classic complementary techniques to identify hazards and their pros and cons. This includes all the content from Task 201, and also practical insights from my 25 years of experience with Mil-Std-882.

You can buy the full video, plus lots of bonus material, here. There are 19 bite-size lessons, with two hours of video content.

Preliminary Hazard Analysis, Task 202

See More Clearly.

In this 45-minute session, The Safety Artisan looks at Preliminary Hazard Analysis, or PHA, which is Task 202 in Mil-Std-882E. We explore Task 202’s aim, description, scope, and contracting requirements. We also provide value-adding commentary and explain the issues with PHA – how to do it well and avoid the pitfalls.

System Requirements Hazard Analysis, Task 203

Law, Regulations, Codes of Practice, Guidance, Standards & Recognised Good Practice.

In this 45-minute session, The Safety Artisan looks at Safety Requirements Hazard Analysis, or SRHA, which is Task 203 in the Mil-Std-882E standard. We explore Task 203’s aim, description, scope, and contracting requirements. SRHA is an important and complex task, which needs to be done on several levels to be successful. This video explains the issues and discusses how to perform SRHA well.

Bundle Offer #1

Click here to buy these three essential tasks – and bonus material – together:

  • Preliminary Hazard Identification (T201),
  • Preliminary Hazard Analysis (T202), and
  • Safety Requirements Hazard Analysis (T203).

Sub-system Hazard Analysis, Task 204

Breaking it down to the constituent parts.

In this video lesson, The Safety Artisan looks at Sub-System Hazard Analysis, or SSHA, which is Task 204 in Mil-Std-882E. We explore Task 204’s aim, description, scope, and contracting requirements. We also provide value-adding commentary and explain the issues with SSHA – how to do it well and avoid the pitfalls.

System Hazard Analysis, Task 205

Putting the pieces of the puzzle together.

In this 45-minute session, The Safety Artisan looks at System Hazard Analysis, or SHA, which is Task 205 in Mil-Std-882E. We explore Task 205’s aim, description, scope, and contracting requirements. We also provide value-adding commentary, which explains SHA – how to use it to complement Sub-System Hazard Analysis (SSHA, Task 204) to get the maximum benefits for your System Safety Program.

Operating and Support Hazard Analysis, Task 206

Operate it, maintain it, supply it, dispose of it.

In this full-length session, The Safety Artisan looks at Operating & Support Hazard Analysis, or O&SHA, which is Task 206 in Mil-Std-882E. We explore Task 205’s aim, description, scope, and contracting requirements. We also provide value-adding commentary, which explains O&SHA: how to use it with other tasks; how to apply it effectively on different products; and some of the pitfalls to avoid. We refer to other lessons for specific tools and techniques, such as Human Factors analysis methods.

Health Hazard Analysis, Task 207

Hazards to human health are many and various.

In this full-length (55-minute) session, The Safety Artisan looks at Health Hazard Analysis, or HHA, which is Task 207 in Mil-Std-882E. We explore the aim, description, and contracting requirements of this complex Task, which covers: physical, chemical & biological hazards; Hazardous Materials (HAZMAT); ergonomics, aka Human Factors; the Operational Environment; and non/ionizing radiation. We outline how to implement Task 207 in compliance with Australian WHS. 

Bundle Offer #2

Click here to buy these two tasks – and bonus material – together:

  • Operating & Support Hazard Analysis (T206), and
  • Health Hazard Analysis (T207).

Functional Hazard Analysis, Task 208

Components where systemic failure dominates random failure.

In this full-length (40-minute) session, The Safety Artisan looks at Functional Hazard Analysis, or FHA, which is Task 208 in Mil-Std-882E. FHA analyses software, complex electronic hardware, and human interactions. We explore the aim, description, and contracting requirements of this Task, and provide extensive commentary on it. 

Bundle Offer #3

Click here to buy these two tasks, and bonus material, together:

  • Preliminary Hazard Identification (T201), and
  • Functional Hazard Analysis (T209).

System-Of-Systems Hazard Analysis, Task 209

Existing systems are often combined to create a new capability.

In this full-length (38-minute) session, The Safety Artisan looks at Systems-of-Systems Hazard Analysis, or SoSHA, which is Task 209 in Mil-Std-882E. SoSHA analyses collections of systems, which are often put together to create a new capability, which is enabled by human brokering between the different systems. We explore the aim, description, and contracting requirements of this Task, and an extended example to illustrate SoSHA. (We refer to other lessons for special techniques for Human Factors analysis.)

Course Bundle Offer #4

Click here to buy these three essential tasks together:

  • Sub-system Hazard Analysis (T204),
  • System Hazard Analysis (T205), and
  • System of System Hazard Analysis (T209).

Environmental Hazard Analysis, Task 210

Environmental requirements in the USA, UK, and Australia.

This is the full, one-hour session on Environmental Hazard Analysis (EHA), which is Task 210 in Mil-Std-882E. We explore the aim, task description, and contracting requirements of this Task, but this is only half the video. We then look at environmental requirements in the USA, UK, and Australia, before examining how to apply EHA in detail under the Australian/international regime. This uses my practical experience of applying EHA. 

The Package Deal

Click here for a bumper deal on all twelve+one lessons:

  • System Safety Process;
  • Design your System Safety Program; and
  • All ten System Safety Analysis tasks.