Safety engineering is an engineering discipline which assures that engineered sy

stems provide acceptable levels of safety. It is strongly related to industrial

engineering/systems engineering, and the subset system safety engineering. Safet
y engineering assures that a life-critical system behaves as needed, even when c
omponents fail.
Analysis techniques can be split into two categories: qualitative and quantitati
ve methods. Both approaches share the goal of finding causal dependencies betwee
n a hazard on system level and failures of individual components. Qualitative ap
proaches focus on the question "What must go wrong, such that a system hazard ma
y occur?", while quantitative methods aim at providing estimations about probabi
lities, rates and/or severity of consequences.
Risk vs Cost/Complexity[1]
The complexity of the technical systems such as Improvements of Design and Mater
ials, Planned Inspections, Fool-proof design, and Backup Redundancy decreases ri
sk and increases the cost. The risk can be decreased to ALARA (as low as reasona
bly achievable) or ALAPA (as low as practically achievable) levels.
Traditionally, safety analysis techniques rely solely on skill and expertise of
the safety engineer. In the last decade model-based approaches have become promi
nent. In contrast to traditional methods, model-based techniques try to derive r
elationships between causes and consequences from some sort of model of the syst
em.