Gain a system-level perspective and understand how to achieve system safety.

This course brings the essential understanding of the safety of technical systems, the most common pitfalls, concepts, and techniques for providing safety. From introducing the key concepts from system engineering and requirements engineering, the lectures and exercises make the connection of these concepts with the key safety precursors and prescriptions. The course will give you all the relevant insights into system safety terminology and system safety process, focusing in-depth on functional safety and safety functions as the most common safety prescription in today’s systems, giving industry-relevant examples. Finally, the course provides you with insights into all quantitative and qualitative measures to attest to the safety integrity of the safety functions, including the methodology to improve and prove the safety integrity of the safety-related system.

Course topics:

• Systems, system engineering lifecycle, system-level design approach with regard to safety
• The system and its boundaries, system environment, context, and interactions with other systems
• Basic principles of specific system life cycle phases, such as requirements engineering, design synthesis, realization, integration, verification, and validation
• Integrative safety process and its phases
• Safety terminology such as hazard, risk, failure, fault, and error
• Basic risk evaluation, including risk matrices/graphs
• The influence of various factors on system safety, including the standards, human factor, security, management, and software
• Functional safety, safety functions, and their application in technical systems
• Failure probability, reliability, failure rate, constant failure rate, MTTF, FIT, mean uptime, downtime, availability