COMP8180: Systems and Software Safety

(6 units)

First Semester

30 one-hour lectures and 6 two-hour Laboratory sessions

Lecturer: TBA

Prerequisites

Enrolment in the MSE program is required.

It will be assumed that the student has at least the mathematical maturity that is normally expected of any engineering graduate. It will be assumed that student has the sort of exposure to software projects that would come from two years of industrial experience as a graduate.

Co-requisites

There are no corequisites.

Syllabus

This course is intended to cover the major issues surrounding the determination of safety criticality and how such a determination affects the various systems and/or software project activities. Techniques for determining hazardous requirements and how to deal with them, together with techniques for establishing the safety faults within design and code will be described and demonstrated.

Assessment

There will be an approximately even split of marks between a final exam and short project.

Description

This course is an introduction to systems safety engineering. The intended focus is on systems that have software as a significant component but the concepts and techniques to be studied are quite general and have been developed in the domains where safety is normally regarded as critical - transport, mining, industrial plants, weaponry and consumer products. In all these areas modern systems will normally depend on reliable software.

The processes that the student will encounter are those that enable a safety engineer to identify hazards, assess risks and ultimately assure safety in a safety case for a critical system.

Rationale

The software engineer working on any sort of critical system, must be equipped with a working knowledge of the available analysis techniques that are appropriate to identifying and analyzing those hazards for a system where the software components are involved. Only where all risks are appropriately bounded can a system be regarded as safe.

Ideas

This course will carry the main responsibility for:

presenting the main ideas of system safety engineering;
developing experience in hazard identification and analysis;
providing experience with safety analysis techniques;
acquainting the student with the concept of a safety case.

Objectives

Upon completion of this course, the student will:

be able to identify and analyze hazards in simple systems;
do risk assessment in a simple system,
be able to participate in a HAZOP team;
construct a safety case for a simple system;
perform safety analysis of a simple system.

Topics

The following topics will be covered:

Safety concepts and terminology;
The safety lifecycle;
Hazard identification;
Modeling event sequences;
Risk assessment and management;
Functional hazard analysis;
HAZOP;
Systematic failure;
Safety of software components;
Safety integrity levels;
Safety cases;
Safety analysis techniques;
Common cause analysis;
System safety analysis;
Safety management;
Human factors;
Safety culture;