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The development, review and acceptance of an explicit 'safety case' forms a key component of the assurance and regulation of many safety critical systems, including those in the nuclear, defence, railway, automotive, medical device, and process industries. Industrial practice in safety case development prior to York's development of the Goal Structuring Notation (GSN) relied almost exclusively upon narrative text to communicate the safety argument within the safety case. This approach suffered from problems of lack of clarity, difficulty in comprehension, poor structure, and limited formalised development of 'case law' in safety argumentation. GSN was developed and matured by York to tackle these problems directly, and is now used internationally by safety critical industries in a large number of domains including defence, transport, nuclear and medical devices.
Research in the Centre for Software Reliability (CSR) at City University London has made significant advances in ways to assess the safety and reliability of safety-critical, fault-tolerant software-based systems. This work supports quantitative safety cases and has influenced practice and regulation in UK and international industries. [text removed for publication] The work has had significant benefit for regulators and licensees of UK nuclear plant, has been recognised in the US nuclear industry and is additionally of benefit to the general public, in ensuring not only that reasoning about the safety of nuclear plant is rigorous and valid, but also that it is seen to be so in order that safety claims are widely and justifiably believed.
Research on the theoretical and experimental assessment of the stability of damaged ships in the Department of Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering from the mid-1990s to the present day has been pivotal in the development, adoption and implementation of the latest amendment of the International Convention on Safety of Life At Sea (SOLAS 2009) by the International Maritime Organization (IMO), the UN body regulating maritime safety. The impact of these regulations has been a significant reduction in the risk to human life at sea by enabling ship design and operation with higher standards of damage stability. SOLAS 2009 represents a step change from deterministic to probabilistic rules and from rule compliance to goal-based standards; it has improved design and operation of all commercial ships built worldwide from 2009, and has thus resulted in far-reaching and long-lasting impact on maritime safety.
Developed from Loughborough University research into the employee impact of safety management, the Loughborough Safety Climate Assessment Toolkit (LSCAT) has helped change attitudes and raise awareness across a variety of industry sectors. Freely available in the public domain, it has facilitated the assessment of safety climate as part of a process of culture change and wider management system enhancement. Beneficiaries during the impact period have included the Royal College of Nursing and the NHS, which have used the tool as a "fundamental" means of benchmarking best practice, and logistics giant DHL Supply Chain, which has used it to identify specific areas for improvement in its safety management systems.
The World Health Organisation's (WHO) Surgical Safety Checklist is the culmination of over 5 years of concerted research effort to better understand, model and intervene in human factors that affect clinical performance and patient safety in operating theatres and surgical care. Imperial researchers were instrumental in the set up and implementation of the WHO `Safe Surgery Saves Lives' working group, launched in 2006, from which the Checklist was a primary outcome. Subsequently, we were co-investigators, and UK-lead, in a global study the implementation of the Checklist in 8 pilot hospitals across 7 continents. The Checklist was demonstrated to significantly improve patient outcomes and was modified and mandated for use in all NHS surgical procedures in England by the National Patient Safety Agency. We have since lead a national study that evaluated the implementation of the Checklist within the NHS and successfully delivered a team training programme aimed at optimising use of the Checklist in our hospitals.
The European Air Traffic Management system currently handles around 26,000 flights daily, with ultimate responsibility for the lives of almost 800 million passengers and crew every year. Professor Chris Johnson's research has directly influenced policy, legislation and regulation across Europe's air traffic control, including the current guidelines on software development in Air Traffic Management, which were incorporated into European law in 2008. He has led the way in harmonising computer infrastructure standards across different agencies throughout the EU, building defences against cyber-attacks and playing a vital role in improving passenger safety.
Research at the Transport Safety Research Centre (TSRC) at Loughborough University has led to the development of a new road safety data and knowledge base called the European Road Safety Observatory (ERSO). The European Commission has confirmed in a reference that it has become a standard tool for EU and national level safety policy development and has been praised by the European Parliament. Since being established in 2006 it has been emulated at national level by many EU Member States including the UK, Spain, Czech Republic, Netherlands and France. The ERSO website now receives over 5000 hits each month from road safety policy-makers across the EU. The research, which was led by TSRC researchers, was conducted between 2004 and 2012 and in 2013 was awarded the HRH Prince Michael International Road Safety Award for its impact on road safety.
Research at Newcastle University on formal methods for the design of computing systems has had a major impact on the delivery of new high-dependability products by industry. The methods (VDM and Event-B), to which we have made significant contributions, have been embodied in tools (VDMTools, Overture, Rodin) and applied in industry. The reach of the work extends to industries in Europe (e.g. in the rail sector by Siemens, 2011) and Japan (e.g. in firmware design by Sony, 2008). Significance is seen in reported improvements in defect detection rates of up to a factor of 5 over previous processes and the cost-effectiveness of design processes. The "Mobile FeliCa" chip developed using VDMTools is now incorporated into over 200 million mobile phones worldwide. Our approach to disseminating research has engendered lively international and online end-user communities further developing and using the tools today.