Assurance Technologies Principles and Practices:
A Product, Process, & System Safety Perspective, 2nd Edition
By Dev G. Raheja and Michael Allocco
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2006, John Wiley & Sons, hardcover List Price: $59.99 (Member/Non-Member pricing will be calculated at final checkout.) |
In Assurance Technologies Principles and Practices, the authors assert that safety is an excellent investment, not a necessary cost. Although system assurance technologies originated in the aerospace industry, many of the processes are applicable to product assurance. Better-designed products can reduce scheduled production time and costs and are safer, both for the consumers and those who produce the products, which in turn result in cheaper and safer products. A product can meet design specifications but still not be safe if the specification, design and use don’t take into account reasonable usage and customer expectations.
- The authors advocate integration of safety considerations with other aspects of design, including:
- Reliability concepts, such as failure-mode, effects and criticality analysis (FMECA), a system assurance concept that addresses failures
- Maintainability concepts, such as equipment repair time, remote availability, inherent availability and mean downtime with safety concepts
- Human engineering, such as standardization of location of safety devices, types of manufacturing errors and controls, prevention of inspection errors, testing for amelioration, human-machine interface
- Quality assurance concepts, such as quality function deployment, quality loss function, benchmarking, capital equipment analysis, process and control plans, statistical process control
- Logistics concepts, such as logistics support analysis, level of repair analysis, time-line analysis, reliability-centered maintenance, and life-cycle logistics
- Software integrity concepts, including and operational requirement, environmental requirements, complexity considerations, duty cycle, nonoperational usage, and qualitative characteristics
The safety aspect is highlighted in 4 new chapters:
- Managing Safety-Related Risks, such as loss control programs, design and safety reviews, hazard analysis and risk assessment and product safety committees
- Statistical Concepts, Loss Analysis, and Safety-Related Applications, such as probabilistic design and risk analyses, sensitivity analysis, analysis of variance, correlation analysis, confidence analysis, regression analysis, critical incident technique, Delphi technique, behavior sampling
- Models, Concepts and Examples: Applying Scenario-Driven Hazard Analysis, including the holistic view, negative events, integrating contingency data, iterative analysis, concurrent engineering, prototyping, scenario sequencing, and the Hammer model
- Automation, Computer and Software Complexities, including software reliability, status complexity analysis, dynamic analysis, test coverage monitoring, use of legacy systems, reusable software, and system redundancy
“This text is very well written and is a great place for Safety Professionals to gain a fundamental understanding of the Assurance Technologies…. [T]he first edition has been close to the gold standard of assurance technology texts ever since it was published.” -- Robert McClay, CSP