System Safety

Dr Chris Elliott, Director, Pitchill Consulting Ltd

Dr Chris Elliott is a system engineer and barrister. He's a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering and author of its guidance on system engineering 'Creating systems that work'. He spent the first 20 years of his career building the company that became Detica, then left to qualify as a barrister and practice in public and environmental law.

That led to developing a consulting practice that bridges engineering and law, helping companies and governments deal with clashes between technology and regulation. He has worked with railways in the UK, EU and Middle East, construction, medical devices and defence. He was retained by BAE Systems to help with a review of its approach to the management of product safety, drawing on the insights provided by the Haddon-Cave report.

What it means to be a part of the IET System Safety conference 2012…
‘Product safety is much less well developed than workplace safety. With support from BAE Systems, we are establishing a global research programme to develop systematic thinking and guidance on best practice. This conference is a chance to share it with a wide range of attendees and, I hope, involve some of them in the work.’

Peter Bernard Ladkin, University of Bielefeld CITEC and Causalis Limited

Peter Bernard Ladkin is a recognised specialist in system safety. He is Professor of Computer Networks and Distributed Systems at the University of Bielefeld in Germany and lead the group of the same name, but known after its German initials as the RVS Group, in the Faculty of Technology at the University of Bielefeld in Germany.

Peter’s interests are: specification, verification, and failure analysis of complex heterogeneous systems, and distributed systems in general. He recently concentrated on problems in rail and aviation contexts, and is the originator of the Why-Because Analysis (WBA) method of causal analysis of incidents, which has been adopted as company standard by Siemens Transportation Systems Rail Automation and Mass Transit Divisions.

Peter has worked in the analysis and optimisation of parallel programs; constraint satisfaction methods and temporal reasoning; and logical, philosophical and ethical issues in computing.

Peter’s research specialises in methods for ensuring the reliability, and for analysing the failure, of complex heterogeneous systems, and distributed systems in general. He has specialised mainly in systems used in public transportation, primarily air and rail. Apart from that, he has worked on constraint satisfaction problems and temporal reasoning, and performed combinatorial analysis of message-passing in concurrent systems. He contributes regularly to the ACM's on-line Forum on Risks to the Public in Computing and Related Systems (the Risks Forum). He is especially keen to apply formal and informal logic in systems engineering, where he feels logical techniques could do a lot of good, and is interested in social and ethical issues and consequences of ubiquitous computing.

Peter Ladkin and his group's current collaborations are primarily with system engineers at the Institute of Railway Systems Engineering and Traffic Safety (IfEV) at the Technical University of Brunswick (Braunschweig); Siemens Transportation Systems Rail Automation Division, Research and Development Integrity, in Brunswick; the Chair of Railway Signalling and Traffic Safety Systems at the Technical University of Dresden; and the company Causalis Limited which he founded.

‘The IET System Safety conference is one of the three main forums in Europe for researcher and industry exchange on system safety, in which Britain has a leading engineering community and tradition. I am delighted in the strong support for this essential work through the IET, and delighted to contribute.’

System Safety – A Glimpse into the Future

Warren Naylor, Lead System Safety Engineer, Electronic Systems, Northrop Grumman

Warren has 35+ years of professional experience performing the full range of firmware (FW)/software (SW) development, FW/SW assurance, SW reliability, testing, security, product assurance, and SW/System safety experience including 14+ years of field support and 21+ years in management/senior staff positions. Responsibilities also included the development and teaching of several professional training courses inclusive of system safety, software safety, CPLD/FPGA safety, safety ethics.

Warren is Lead Northrop Grumman Electronic Systems Sector Consulting System Safety Engineer. In his role, he advises on all NGES, system safety programs (SW, HW, FW, and Envronmental) on campuses nationwide. He performs, presents, and defends NGES accident/incident investigations, flight certification, and SOF assessments and is Founder/Chairperson of NGC’s System Safety Community of Practice. He advises exec management on SSE problems and activities and also teaches a variety of system safety workshops/courses. He is an author of a full range of system safety plans and performs HW, SW, and FW system safety analyses, audits, and inspections.

Warren’s professional activities include being immediate Past President of the International System Safety Society (ISSS), he was Chairperson for the 2007 System Safety Conference and President of the DC Chapter of the ISSS. He is a contributing author to RTCA DO-278 and ANSI-STD-0010 and has supported the FAA in the harmonisation of standards between airborne and CNS/ATM.

Warren has published many articles including: maintaining safety in a COTS environment, assessing safety and programmatic risks of proposed system upgrades and integrating software safety and software reliability.

Synopsis

System Safety Engineering is at a cross roads. An in depth analysis of our profession is required to better understand the ramifications of the varying directions and to successfully navigate the winds of our future. The issues facing system safety engineering are many, with cost and schedule being our primary hazard causal factor driven by the worldwide recession, enormous Government debt, and the evolving new technologies.

To successfully plot a course around these issues, we must develop our systems faster, cheaper, and more affordably!  System Safety Engineering cannot be excluded from these development efforts and in fact, must lead them!

Failing to lead will result in System Safety Engineering becoming increasingly ignored, forgotten, bypassed, or even worse, eliminated until the next great widely published accident occurs. We cannot, in good conscience, stand by and let this fate befall our humble and worthy profession.

This discussion will hopefully raise awareness of these issues and propose solutions to allow us to manage our fate.