Improvements in System Safety Proceedings of the Sixteenth Safety-critical Systems Symposium, Bristol, UK, 5-7 February 2008

Improvements in System Safety contains the full complement of papers presented at the sixteenth annual Safety-critical Systems Symposium, held at Bristol, UK, in February 2008.

The Symposium is for engineers, managers and academics in the field of safety, across all industry sectors, and so the papers included in this volume offer a wide-ranging coverage of major safety issues as well as a good blend of academic research and industrial experience. They include discussions of some of the most recent developments in the field.

The book begins with a tutorial examining the recent marked shift in the regulatory approach to ensuring software safety. Whereas compliance with development standards used to be norm, the responsibility has now shifted on to the developers and operators to construct and present well reasoned arguments that their software is acceptably safe (in a system context). These arguments, together with supporting evidence, are typically assembled, structured and presented in a software ‘safety case’. This tutorial is crucial to all involved in the discipline and an excellent introduction to the topics subsequently discussed.

The first paper reflects a tutorial – on The Safety Case – held on the first day of the Symposium. The subsequent 14 papers are presented under the headings of the Symposium’s sessions: Themes Reprised from SSS ’07; The Safety Case; Safety Culture; Human Factors; Achieving and Improving System Safety; Safety and Risk Analysis.

This book will be of interest to both academics and practitioners working in the safety-critical systems arena.