Course description
Advanced Topics in Safety (ADTS)
Robotics and Autonomous Systems (RAS) are being increasingly used as elements in safety-critical applications in a variety of domains. These technologies provide many challenges to current system safety engineering methods and assurance techniques.
In this module, we will identify the nature of the safety challenges - technical, engineering and social - posed by RAS and consider their implications for legislation and regulatory guidance for engineering practice. We will consider the challenges posed to safety engineering techniques and praxis by Robotics and Autonomous Systems in three broad areas:
- Technical challenges: we will explore the nature of decision-making technologies and will consider the implications for data management, model learning, verification and deploment and understanding of the interaction between AS and the "outside world", including humans.
- Engineering challenges: including the elicitation and validation of safety requirements, identifying and analysing new classes of hazard and understanding how failures propagate in systems with an autonomous component, implication for incident report and investigation, etc.
- Social challenges: including the role and expectations of the human in interactions with RAS, ethical concerns, acceptance and communication of risk and challenges for the law, governance and regulatory regimes in a number of domains. Implications for the safety case, particularly with reference to machine understanding and decision-making, will be considered throughout the module.
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Upcoming start dates
Suitability - Who should attend?
This course is suitable for:
- Practitioners across all domains including aerospace, military, railway, automotive, civil nuclear, civil maritime, medical devices and healthcare;
- Developers of equipment safety cases during design for software, hardware, procedures, systems and/or platforms;
- Developers of safety cases for operational safety and disposal;
- Reviewers of safety cases within an organisation or as an independent activity;
- Developers and reviewers of changes to existing safety-critical / safety-related equipment and operations;
- Project managers where development of a safety case is a significant element of projects they manage;
- Regulators of safety critical domains.
Prerequisites
A basic understanding of system safety terminology and lifecycle via prior learning or industrial experience. It is useful for you to have taken our Foundations of System Safety Engineering course.
Outcome / Qualification etc.
By the end of this module, students will be able to:
- Identify the disruptors - technical, engineering and social - to existing system safety engineering practices generated by RAS;
- Describe the core elements of RAS systems engineering, sufficient for safety engineering and assurance understanding;
- Discuss the validation and verification aspects of machine learning;
- Describe and evaluate the implications for and changes required in safety assessment and assurance practices to accommodate RAS as emerging technologies;
- Use consistent and clear terminology in communications about RAS engineering and safety;
- Identify the societal impact of RAS and implications for risk acceptance;
- Identify the potential impact of RAS on current regulatory requirements and guidance in a variety of safety-critical domains.
Course delivery details
During the teaching week there will be a combination of lecture materials and case studies to explore. The case studies give you the chance to work through an example to reinforce your learning from the lectures.