5.

1 Safety Risk
- Freedom from unacceptable risk; Combination of the probability of
occurrence of harm and the severity of that harm.

5.1.1 The concept of Safety

- System safety and reliability engineering is an engineering discipline.
Continuous changes in technology, environmental regulation and public safety
concerns make the analysis of complex safety-critical systems more and more
demanding.
A common fallacy, for example among electrical engineers regarding structure
power systems, is that safety issues can be readily deduced. In fact, safety issues
have been discovered one by one, over more than a century in the case mentioned,
in the work of many thousands of practitioners, and cannot be deduced by a single
individual over a few decades. A knowledge of the literature, the standards and
custom in a field is a critical part of safety engineering. A combination of theory and
track record of practices is involved, and track record indicates some of the areas of
theory that are relevant. (In the USA, persons with a state license in Professional
Engineering in Electrical Engineering are expected to be competent in this regard,
the foregoing notwithstanding, but most electrical engineers have no need of the
license for their work.)
Safety is often seen as one of a group of related disciplines: quality, reliability,
availability, maintainability and safety. (Availability is sometimes not mentioned, on
the principle that it is a simple function of reliability and maintainability.) These
issues tend to determine the value of any work, and deficits in any of these areas
are considered to result in a cost, beyond the cost of addressing the area in the first
place; good management is then expected to minimize total cost.

5.1.2 Risk
- Any uncertainty about the future.

Technically can be both positive and negative

Safety questions focus only on negative outcomes

5.1.3 Acceptability of Risk

- In order to be accepted by individuals and society risks must be measured
in some way and, as a result, risk as a concept embodies other dimensions. The
probability of a hazardous event may differ between two individuals; the risk may
not increase proportionately with exposure; the outcome from a hazardous event
may be delayed in time; and there may be a multiplicity of possible outcomes. The
expected outcome from a particular hazard in a given time interval is determined by
both risk and exposure. For some hazards, the number of deaths may increase

exponentially with exposure, or there may be a safe limit below which the death
rates are unaffected by exposure. To evaluate the degree of impact of a hazard
both risk and exposure levels must be taken into account.
In contrast to the early statistical assessment of risk, the intrinsic psychosocial
nature of risk acceptability was initially studied through psychophysics and
psychometrics of risk perception (Slovic et al., 1990; Tversky and Kahneman, 1974).
There were two main ideas that emerged at about the same time, first risk was
recognized as a social construct and secondly that implicit theories of risk
perception have developed among laypeople that describe how risks are evaluated,
accepted and how personal decisions concerning different risks occur. (Heimer,
1988; Lupton, 1999ab). Thus, risk acceptability was determined to be a measure of
an individuals tolerance for risk derived from a social construct influenced by a
number of acquired factors.

5.2 Assessing and Reducing Risk

- Risk Assessment is an effective mean of identifying system or process
safety risks

Characterizes hazards within risk areas and critical technical processes

Analyzes them for their potential mishap severity and probabilities of
occurrence
Prioritizes them for Risk Acceptance.
- The process of developing options and actions to enhance opportunities and
to reduce threats to the project objectives

Proactive, not reactive

Appropriate to significance of risk
Cost effective
Timely

5.2.1 Uncertainties in Design

- Uncertainty is ubiquitous in engineering design. The past decade has seen a
significant growth of research developments in design under uncertainty, and a
wide range of applications from designing simple product components to designing
complex and emerging engineered systems. While methods like robust design and
reliability-based design optimization have become mature and widely adopted in
computational design software, it has become evident that these techniques are
mostly limited to handling parametric uncertainty. New methods and strategies for
uncertainty characterization, problem formulation, preference elicitation, and risk
mitigation are needed for managing many other sources of uncertainty in design
such as those associated with modeling and prediction, the design process itself,
the product use environment, emergent system behavior, and the changing market.

5.2.2 Risk Benefit Analysis

Risk perception is the subjective judgment people make about the severity
and/or probability of a risk, and may vary person to person. Any human endeavor
carries some risk, but some are much riskier than others.

5.2.3 Personal Risk

- is the potential of losing something of value. Values (such as physical
health, social status, emotional well-being or financial wealth) can be gained or lost
when taking risk resulting from a given action, activity and/or inaction, foreseen or
unforeseen. Risk can also be defined as the intentional interaction with uncertainty.
Uncertainty is a potential, unpredictable, unmeasurable and uncontrollable
outcome, risk is a consequence of action taken in spite of uncertainty.
Risk perception is the subjective judgment people make about the severity and/or
probability of a risk, and may vary person to person. Any human endeavor carries
some risk, but some are much riskier than others.

5.2.4 Public Risk and Public Acceptance

- Scientific and technological innovation is increasingly rapid and having farreaching effects on society. Major change is occurring in all aspects of our lives,
most notably in the way we communicate with each other, in the food we consume,
in the nature of the materials which form everyday objects, and in future energy
systems. All of these carry potential risks and benefits, and there has been growing
public concern about trust in experts. In response, there have been attempts to
'engage' the public in various ways and to assess the acceptability of these
innovations. This volume brings together leading social scientists to present the
most up-to-date research about these topics, and to examine the debates about risk
and public acceptance of new technologies.

5.2.5 Examples of Improved Safety

- Two Examples of Safety Improvement: Automobile Travel and Agricultural
Pest Control
Ill make this personal. Im really glad that my granddaughter will do all her
automobile travel in vehicles that are far safer than what I survived. She also gets
to ride in an infant car seat which I never did. Im equally glad that she has a food
supply that is cheaper, safer, more environmentally sustainable, and vastly more
diverse than what was available to my family when I was a child. I just wish that
more people appreciated the second change.