System Safety Training: MIL-STD 882E

The goal of system safety is to optimize safety by the identification of safety related risks, eliminating or controlling them by design and/or procedures, based on acceptable system safety precedence.

Along with system safety procedures in the private sector, the Department of Defense also has its own standard called MIL-STD 882E, which identifies the DoD approach for identifying hazards and assessing and mitigating associated risks encountered in the development, test, production, use and disposal of defense systems.

MIL-STD-882E presents a singular linear relationship between the mechanism that triggers a hazard and the resulting mishap.

This Standard covers hazards as they apply to systems / products / equipment / infrastructure (including both hardware and software) throughout design, development, test, production, use and disposal. When this Standard is required in a solicitation or contract but no specific task is identified, only Sections 3 and 4 are mandatory.

The definitions in 3.2 and all of Section 4 delineate the minimum mandatory definitions and requirements for an acceptable system safety effort for any DoD system.

The MIL-STD is a simplistic approach that focuses on single-point system failures. Its application during the design phase works well in identifying catastrophic single-point failures that are often designed out or substantially mitigated to reduce the probability of occurrence.

The direct causative relationship between a mishap and the single-point failure mechanism generally guides systems engineers to design a system that has a very low probability of occurrence of single-point failures.

Military analysts believe that the application of MIL-STD-882E during the design phase of the systems engineering process works well in identifying catastrophic single-point failures that are then often designed out or substantially mitigated to reduce the probability of occurrence.

Want to learn more? Tonex offers System Safety courses, which cover important system safety concepts and techniques used in planning, designing, implementing, testing and operating safety-critical systems.

Participants learn about fundamental concepts of system safety engineering, systems safety control, nature of risk, accident and human error models, causes of accidents, system hazard analysis, designing for safety, fault tolerance, safety issues in the design of human-machine interaction, verification of safety, creating a safety culture, and management of safety-critical projects.

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