Safeware Engineering Corporation: System Safety Training

LOCATION AND DATE: Talaris (nee Aljoya) Conference Center, Seattle, WA, TBD for 2009

TEXTS: (1) N.G. Leveson, Safeware: System Safety and Computers, Addison-Wesley, 1995 and (2) draft chapters of my new book.

DESCRIPTION: Software allows unprecedented levels of complexity and new failure modes that are starting to overwhelm the standard approaches to ensuring safety. The causes of accidents are even changing. This class will cover fundamental concepts and techniques in building and ensuring safety, with particular emphasis on those aspects of complex systems not handled well by traditional system safety approaches, such as software and human-computer interaction. While traditional system safety will be covered, new and unique approaches to hazard analysis, root cause analysis, and risk management will be covered including the instructors new STAMP accident causation model and new hazard analysis technique called STPA.

Emphasis will be on procedures and techniques that are practical enough to be applied to projects today. Real project experiences with these techniques in different application areas will be described and recent software-related accidents will be reviewed and analyzed.

The goal of this class is not to learn how to satisfy a particular safety standard but rather how to design a tailored program that will be most effective for your project. The class size will be limited to encourage interaction. Students will work on example problems in small groups.

INSTRUCTOR: Dr. Leveson is a Professor in the MIT Aeronautics and Astronautics Dept. and in the Engineering Systems Division and is head of the MIT Complex Systems Research Lab (CSRL). Previously, she was Boeing Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington. Dr. Leveson is a founder of the field of software safety and has worked in this area since 1980. Before becoming a professor, she was a system engineer for IBM. Dr. Leveson consults widely on safety-critical systems for both government and industry and has worked with aerospace, nuclear power, transportation, aircraft, and medical systems. In 1995, Dr. Leveson was awarded the AIAA Information Systems Award for ``developing the field of software safety and system engineering practices where life and property are at stake.'' She received the 1999 ACM Allen Newell Award for "pioneering work in establishing the foundations of software safety," and the 2004 ACM Outstanding Software Research Award. In 1999, Dr. Leveson was elected to the National Academy of Engineering (NAE).

For Additional Information Contact:

Dr. Nancy Leveson

617-258-0505

leveson@mit.edu

URL: http://sunnyday.mit.ed