ABSTRACT
The introduction of safety margins in traditional engineering is a protection design technique aimed at providing some additional protection capability beyond the one that is considered strictly necessary. The benefit of using safety margins is two-fold. On one hand, they allow to accommodate tolerances for little known phenomena, uncertainties in model data, variabilities in initial or boundary conditions, and so on. On the other, they result in a significant simplification of the design methods as they allow to split the design in several decoupled stages where the applicable criteria are not too closely linked to the details of the phenomenology considered in the design analyses.
