System safety

Lectures: 1 session / week, 3 hours / session

We are increasingly designing and operating potentially very dangerous systems while, at the same time, our systems are becoming much more complex than in the past. Events like Air France 477, the Columbia Space Shuttle losses, Deepwater Horizon, Fukushima and Chernobyl, and many other lesser known accidents, are contributing to a demand for greater skills and accountability on the part of engineers and managers.

When engineers were creating systems that were relatively simple and the impact of design errors and failures was limited, learning on the job was adequate. But the situation is changing: Complexity is increasing rapidly in the systems we are building, partly because of the extensive use of software. The result is an increase in the physical and environmental harm that engineers can cause. This class will teach s how to use state-of-the-art system engineering techniques to build safer systems and to operate them in a safe manner.

Topics include:

There are two textbooks for the class:

In addition, a few other readings will be assigned through out the semester. Our new STPA Primer (draft) will also be provided for reference, but you are not required to read it.

Each homework assignment will be graded with a number from 1–10 as listed in the following table:

For the final grade, there are 4 assignments (Ethics, Citichem, Reading questions, Accident report), a CAST (accident analysis), and a class project. The breakdown of the final grade is summarized as follows:

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