Technology, Society and Risk

Abstract

There remains a healthy debate among those working in the fun-ctional safety field over issues that appear to be fundamental to the discipline. Coming from an industry that is a relative newcomer to this discipline I look to the more established industries to give a lead. Not only are they in debate about key issues, the approaches taken do not always transfer easily to a mass market product, developed within very tight business constraints. Key issues that are debated include:

• What is meant by risk, what is acceptable risk and who does the accepting?

• How do we justify that an acceptable risk has been, or will be, achieved?

• What role does the development process play?

• What is meant by the concept of a Safety Integrity Level?

In this talk I will air some views on these questions based on my experience of deve-loping automotive systems and authoring industry sector guidelines and standards in the hope that this will provoke informed discussion.