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- Safety engineering is an engineering discipline which assures that engineered systems provide acceptable levels of safety. It is strongly related to systems engineering, industrial engineering and the subset system safety engineering. Safety engineering assures that a life-critical system behaves as needed, even when components fail. The primary goal of safety engineering is to manage risk, eliminating or reducing it to acceptable levels. Risk is the combination of the probability of a failure event and the severity resulting from the failure. For instance, the severity of a particular failure may result in fatalities, injuries, property damage or nothing more than annoyance. It may be a frequent, occasional or rare occurrence. The acceptability of the failure depends on the combination of the two. Probability is often more difficult to predict than severity due to the many factors that could lead to a failure, such as mechanical failure, environmental effects, and operator error. Safety engineering attempts to reduce the frequency of failures, and ensure that when failures do occur, the consequences are not life-threatening. For example, bridges are designed to carry loads well in excess of the heaviest truck likely to use them. This reduces the likelihood of being overloaded. Most bridges are designed with redundant load paths, so that if any one structural member fails, the structure will remain standing. This reduces the severity if the bridge is overloaded.
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