System Safety Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 3500 words

System Safety - Essay Example One of the biggest challenges faced by the development team is management of hazards in critical software implementations for control systems and automation. The objective of this paper is to present a detailed analysis of challenges of System Safety, analysis of hazards, techniques of implementing System safety and global best practices followed. Mueller in 1968 described System Safety Engineering as an "organized common sense" (Leveson, 2003). Quoting this comment in her paper on safety engineering, Nancy Leveson (2003) stressed on the need for a disciplined and systematic approach to identify, analyze and control the hazards throughout the life cycle of a system (Leveson, 2003). She proposed a systematic approach of safety engineering in this paper. The steps of her approach will be taken as benchmark and mapped with the modern approach to System Safety in developing Software for Critical Systems in this paper. Risk Management: Nancy Leveson emphasized the need for Risk Management as one of the major disciplines in Safety Engineering (Leveson, 2003). ... viating from the System Requirements or becoming vulnerable to hackers & unauthorized modifications in production environment if improper controls are practiced in the development environment. Example, If the software is supposed to control electro-mechanical devices then vulnerabilities and unauthorized modifications in the software system may lead to hazards, accidents, loss of property and loss of mission in the operating environment. There can be many approaches to Risk Management in developing Software for critical systems. The most appropriate Risk Management approach applicable in the modern Software Development environments is defined in the Risk Management guide by National Institute of Standards & Technology, US Department of commerce (Stoneburner, Guguen, et al, 2004) and the BS ISO/IEC 27005:2008 standard (www.bsi-global.com). The approach presented herewith (Figure 1) can be very easily mapped with a software development project. This process is an intelligent mix of qua litative as well as quantitative analytical processing. The first step is to collate a list of all assets planned to be used in the software environment and then carry out their characterization. Risk Assessment Workflow Figure 1 The assets used in a software controlled critical production environment are: Software Workflows, Software Components (Units, Modules, Connectors, etc.), Servers, Desktops/Laptops, RDBMS systems, Middleware, Interfacing devices, Control devices, High Availability components, Underlying Network Architecture, Alerts & Alarm systems, Network Integration components (example, TCP/IP to RS232 converters), etc. The characterization of these assets essentially requires proper identification (asset tagging), asset ownership, purpose of asset and location of asset. Post