3. System Safety

System safety is a well-researched field with well-established terminology. To be able to correctly design for safety, we need to understand hazards and their associated risk. Each hazard may lead to an incident or an accident. The risk associated with each hazard can and needs to be assessed and quantified. In this chapter, we would lay out a procedure for assessing hazards, quantifying risk, and iterating the design until the hazards are removed or risk is reduced to the acceptable level. Our technical systems, therefore, can (and must!) be assessed for safety from the earliest project stages, starting from ideation, through requirements definition, then design and implementation, verification and validation, all the way into deployment and decommissioning.