A safety-critical-system is an engineered system — comprising hardware, software, and operating procedures — whose failure, malfunction, or improper operation can directly cause serious injury, death, significant environmental damage, or major economic loss. It is defined by five parameters: (1) consequence severity — the system's failure mode maps to one or more of injury, death, environmental harm, or major economic loss; (2) criticality determination — its safety criticality is established through formal hazard analysis methods (e.g., HAZOP, FMEA, fault-tree analysis) rather than heuristic judgment; (3) lifecycle governance — the system is subject to rigorous design, validation, testing, and maintenance regimes that exceed standard engineering practice; (4) safety functions — it executes one or more safety functions that bring the process to or maintain a safe state when detected conditions warrant; (5) regulatory mandate — it exists within a framework of statutory or industry-mandated safety requirements. The system persists through documentation, institutionalized safety practices, certification regimes, and physical implementation — not as an idea but as a managed artifact whose continued operation is actively verified. [formal: systema securitatis critica | substrate: matter | horizon: a life | explicit: yes | epoch: 0.01]
Accepted ontology entry
safety-critical-system
A safety-critical-system is an engineered system — comprising hardware, software, and operating procedures — whose failure, malfunction, or improper operation can directly cause serious injury, death, significant environmental damage, or m…
Definition
Why it is in scope
A system whose failure or improper operation can result in serious injury, death, significant environmental damage, or major economic loss. Its criticality is determined through hazard analysis and risk assessment per IEC 61508/61511 standards, and its design, verification, and maintenance are subject to rigorous regulatory and engineering controls.
Names and aliases
- safety-critical-systemen · CANONICAL
Relations from this entry
- cms8olo5701ld73fkxedp404qSERVES →
safety-critical-system SERVES process-safety: a safety-critical-system is engineered and maintained for the sake of process-safety. Its design, validation, and lifecycle management exist to prevent or mitigate hazardous events in industrial operations. Per Law 8d: for-whose-sake — the system's entire existence is to further process-safety objectives.
- cms9v8tp7027z7skqltjk96q6DEPENDS_ON →
A safety-critical system depends on safety architecture for its fault-tolerant design — the structured approach to ensuring safety through redundancy, isolation, and fail-safe mechanisms. Remove safety architecture and safety-critical systems lose their structural safety guarantees; the system ceases to function as safety-critical. This is an operating dependency per Law 8.
- cms89fknp002773fkfmafs3brDEPENDS_ON →
Safety-critical systems require hazard identification, analysis, and mitigation to operate. Remove hazard (as the domain of risk that the system must manage) and the safety-critical system loses its purpose and operating domain — it cannot identify what is safe without identifying what is hazardous. Removal test passes.
Relations to this entry
- cms93jrrz005e7skqhyoy3s5l← SERVES
Risk-treatment (selecting and implementing controls to modify risk) serves safety-critical-systems by ensuring their risk controls are properly applied to maintain safety integrity.
- cms9iczqo017w7skq3uywdrbk← SERVES
A safety committee is built and maintained for the sake of safety-critical systems. Its purpose is to oversee, review, and advise on safety matters for these systems. Servant→master per Law 8d.
- cms93u2c800677skqnxrp71o9← SERVES
Behavioral safety programs are designed to improve the safety of safety-critical systems by influencing human behavior. They serve the safety of critical systems, not the other way around. Law 8d: for whose sake? The servant (behavioral safety) points at the master (safety-critical system).
Record identity
- Created
- Jul 31, 2026, 10:05 AM UTC
- Content hash
- 91df3881cf024754584809be5ee09f3343a41c46720434b35941b919176022d6