ABSTRACT
This chapter provides basic background into Safety Engineering, related issues, considerations, methodologies, and safety-related costs to ensure that safe products are developed. Safety requirements must be incorporated very early in the product design and product attribute engineering process. Safety reviews must be conducted during both the design and manufacturing phases to ensure that the products do not have any design and manufacturing defects that will increase risks to the users as well as the manufacturer. The topics covered in this chapter include the following: (1) definition accident, (2) accident causation theories, (3) safety performance measurement, (4) product liability principles, and (5) approaches and methodologies used in solving safety-related problems. Two types of measures (i.e., variables) are used to measure safety performance. This chapter discusses both the accident-based measures and (2) non-accident measures (i.e., based on measurements of data from events other than accidents). The accident-based measures are more believable as compared with non-accident measures. The advantages of the non-accident measures are that they can be obtained without waiting for accidents to occur and the non-accident events occur at much higher rates than accidents that in general occur very rarely.
