ABSTRACT
This chapter describes tools used by safety engineers to solve various safety problems such as (a) identifying hazards inherent in a product, (b) analyzing accidents occurring during the product use, and (c) monitoring safety performance during the product life cycle. The tools covered in this chapter are: (a) hazard identification and risk-reduction tools such as hazard analysis, failure modes and effects analysis (FMEA), and fault tree analysis (FTA), (b) analyses of accident databases by data-sorting and tabulating, and determination of accident rates and causal factors of certain types of accidents, (c) identifying and selecting countermeasures to reduce future accidents, and (d) evaluating effectiveness of countermeasures by conducting analyses of data from before-after studies, maintaining control charts, and performing cost–benefit analyses. This chapter also presents (a) approaches for improving product reliability by studying the effects of series, parallel, and hybrid product configurations, and (b) descriptions of the reliability engineer’s role in product development and tasks in relation to the systems engineering process.
