The next generation of safety standards - wishful thinking?

摘要

Safety standards are a description of best. Changing technologies are leading to new ways of doing things and the standards need to be regularly updated. Such updates are also an opportunity to remove the weaknesses and inconsistencies that have been revealed after the first years of experience with applying them. Standards are unfortunately inconsistent: there are almost always several standards that apply simultaneously. Standards are fuzzy: they have unclear, incomplete, inconsistent and often even unnecessary definitions. Standards are incomplete: they address a specific aspect of safety, typically the technical properties of instrumentation or equipment. But safety can be achieved with several means, such as utilising the laws of nature (design properties) or applying administrative procedures. Qualification of personnel can also influence the safety properties of the final product, but there is no standard for qualification of safety engineers. These aspects must be considered, even if the standards don't address them. Standards can become obsolete as fast as the technology that they are addressing. Incorporating new and emerging technologies in a standard is a challenge, but not an impossibility. For the next update of the standards, the foregoing aspects could and should be addressed. This would give us consistent, clear-cut and holistic safety standards.