Safety-critical system
A life-critical system or safety-critical system is a system whose failure or malfunction may result in death or serious injury. Risks of this sort are usually handled with safety engineering.
Software engineering for life-critical systems is particularly difficult, but the avionics industry has succeeded in producing standard methods for producing life-critical avionics software. This is sometimes done using programmable logic controllers.
Examples of life-critical systems
- emergency services dispatch systems
- electricity generation, transmission and distribution
- telecommunications
- heart-lung machines
- mechanical ventilation systems
- radiation therapy machines
- nuclear reactor control systems
- airbag systems
- braking systems
- seat belts
- air traffic control systems
- avionics, particularly fly-by-wire systems
See Also
- safety engineering
- reliability theory
- nuclear reactor
- biomedical engineering
- SAPHIRE (risk analysis software)