A life-critical system or safety-critical system is a system whose failure or malfunction may result in:
- death or serious injury to people, or
- loss or severe damage to equipment or
- environmental harm.
Risks of this sort are usually managed with the methods and tools of safety engineering. A life-critical system is designed to lose less than one life per billion (109) hours of operation. Typical design methods include probabilistic risk assessment, a method that combines failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA) with fault tree analysis. Safety-critical systems are increasingly computer-based.
Read more about Life-critical System: Reliability Regimes, Software Engineering For Life-critical Systems
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