What is Safety?

Safety Definition
There are different definitions of safety. Safety can be defined as “freedom from those conditions that can cause death, injury, occupational illness, or damage to or loss of equipment or property, or damage to the environment” (MIL-Std-882C, 1993).

According to APR 4761A, safety can be defined as the condition in which the risk of harm to persons or damage to property is reduced to, and maintained at or below, an acceptable level through a continuing process of hazard identification and risk management.
This definition highlights the importance of identifying hazards and assessing risks in order to mitigate them and maintain an acceptable level of safety. It emphasizes the need for a continuous process of risk management to ensure that safety is maintained over time, as new hazards and risks may arise. Additionally, it recognizes that safety is ultimately about reducing the risk of harm to people and property.

IEEE Std-1228 (1994) defines software safety as “freedom from software hazard,” where software hazard is defined as “a software condition that is a prerequisite to an accident,” and an accident is defined as “an unplanned event or series of events that results in death, injury, illness, environmental damage, or damage to or loss of equipment or property”. Here we assume that the term “property” also includes intellectual property.

In another words, Safety is “the degree to which accidental harm is prevented, detected, and reacted to”. It is important to emphasize when we are speaking about Safety that the damages are unintentional.


Safety vs. Reliability
Engineers routinely assume that the more reliable a system is, the safer it is, and vice versa. This assumption is sometimes somewhat erroneous, while sometimes very erroneous and leads to a lot of confusion in systems failure analysis.

Actually, it is often true that the safer the system, the less reliable it is. Consider an elevator: The maximum level of safety is provided by an inop­erative elevator—its doors won’t shut on you or your dog; pressing buttons won’t cause anything unsafe to happen. Enter the inoperative elevator, stay inside as long as you wish, exit it—you are 100% safe.

What about relia­bility? As the inoperative elevator is functionally ineffective, it’s absolutely unreliable and unavailable for moving you up and down to different floors of the building— its reliability is zero.
To improve the safety of a reliable (moving) elevator, designers add elements and controls that limit and even decrease the probability of its adequate operation. For example, a sensor that indicates proper door closure may be added. If the sensor is out of order, the elevator won’t move: reliability decreases while safety improves.
This trivial example demonstrates that in some cases there is an appar­ent contradiction between safety and reliability.

However, in many cases safety and reliability are in a full accord. This happens when proper straightforward functioning of a system (just without failures) is enough for both reliable and safe operation. For example, an elevator’s mechanical system: the more reliable the mechanical elements, the more reliable and safer the elevator.




See also:
Safety Assessment 
Safety Management 
ALD Safety Services for Certification
SAE 4754A