Life-critical system - Definition and Overview

A life-critical system or safety-critical system is a system whose failure or malfunction may result in death or serious injury. Risks of this sort are usually handled with safety engineering. Examples of some applications are listed below.

Software engineering for life-critical systems is particularly difficult, but the avionics industry has succeeded in producing standard methods for producing life-critical avionics software. This is sometimes done using programmable logic controllers.

Examples of life-critical systems

Infrastructure

• emergency services dispatch systems
• electricity generation, transmission and distribution
• telecommunications

Medicine

The technology requirements can go beyond avoidance of failure, and can even facilitate medical intensive care (which deals with healing patients), and also life support (which is for stabilizing patients).

• heart-lung machines
• mechanical ventilation systems
• radiation therapy machines

Nuclear engineering

• nuclear reactor control systems

Recreation

• amusement rides
• parachutes

Transportation

Automotive

• airbag systems
• braking systems
• seat belts

Aviation

• air traffic control systems
• avionics, particularly fly-by-wire systems

See Also

• safety engineering
• reliability theory
• nuclear reactor
• biomedical engineering
• SAPHIRE (risk analysis software)

External links

• An Example of a Life-Critical System (http://shemesh.larc.nasa.gov/fm/fm-why-def-life-critical.html)