Development of a New Undergrad Subject in System Safety

While engineers are increasingly designing and operating very dangerous systems, almost no education is provided about how to do this safely. Engineering students are traditionally taught a little about redundancy and increasing the integrity of individual components, but nothing about the other ninety percent of system safety and about preventing accidents that arise from interactions among components and not simply individual component failure. Perhaps because safety engineering was a grassroots movement that came out of industry in the 1950s, and not the universities, classes on safety engineering and system safety were never developed. Although reliability has always been important in research and teaching in universities, most of safety engineering has to be taught to engineers once they get on the job. This project proposes to develop of an undergraduate class at MIT and curricular materials that could be used at other universities to teach engineering system safety.