Data Centric - the Sixth Age of Safety: Communications Enabled Transition from Function to Service

摘要

Early applications of system safety focused on analysis resulting in the identification of the risks associated with functional failure, and attribution of integrity requirements to functions. Limitations in early software systems restricted their application to small-scale protection systems. Subsequent developments have seen such systems grow in scope, scale and complexity, not only in the application, but also the interconnected nature of the application domain. This interconnected domain extends consideration of (safety) function, to flow, and from flow, to service. In this paper we revisit discussions about how to address socio-technical systems through the 'Ages of Safety' structure, originally identified by Hale and Hovden (1998) [1] and extended by many authors. This allows us to propose a sixth age of safety: the Data Centric Age to address functions, flows and services.