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The Safety-critical Systems Symposium (SSS), held each February for seventeen
consecutive years, offers a full-day tutorial followed by two days of presentations
of papers. This book of Proceedings contains all the papers presented at SSS’09.
The first paper accompanies the tutorial, which addresses one of the most important
and fundamental disciplines in the safety field, that of hazard analysis, and
advocates a new approach for dealing with the increasing complexity of the systems
being built today.
The Symposium is for engineers, managers, and academics in the field of safety,
across all industry sectors, so its papers always cover a range of topics. Given
that system safety engineering involves spending money in order to reduce the
chances and consequences of accidents, moral and economic questions inevitably
arise concerning the amount of money that is, or should be, spent on safety. This
year, three papers address these questions.
Case studies of the application of safety techniques to real systems are always
popular with audiences at the Symposium, and this year’s event featured a number
of such papers, including two in a section on transport safety, looking at examples
on the roads and railways.
Recent changes in the law have been made in response to major accidents occurring
in the past few years, but controversy still rages about the use of criminal
law as a tool for improving safety. These matters are raised in a section on safety
in society, as are issues relating to professionalism in system safety engineering.
Every year sees new challenges, in the safety field as in others, and two of this
year’s papers focus on very different types of challenge: one highly technological,
and the other concerned with the introduction of well established safety approaches
into a new domain.
The final two sections address safety assessment and safety standards, both
areas of perennial interest and of continuing active development. Some of these
papers bring new insights to established areas of practice, some report practical
experience, some reflect major developments in the regulatory arena; all have
something important to say to those working in the field of system safety engineering.
Overall, the papers in this volume address many of the topics that are of current
concern to the safety-critical systems community, and we are grateful to the authors
for their contributions. We also thank our sponsors for their valuable support,
and the exhibitors at the Symposium’s tools and services fair for their participation.
And we thank Joan Atkinson and her team for laying the event’s
foundation through their planning and organisation. |
