Viability of a systemic safety management system

Reliability may be regarded as the non-failure of a system whatever the causes of failure might be, whether management failure or hardware failures; and whatever the system. Concerning safety management systems, there is effectively no attention given in the literature to how evaluate quantitatively their effectiveness. There is a need to introduce the concept of viability of a systemic safety management system (SSMS) model and it has been define as: Viability = P(the SSMS has the capacity to maintain the risk within an acceptable range, for a stated period of time). This paper presents an illustrative computer simulation in order to evaluate the viability of a safety management system. Although, in this example, very simple, assumptions have been made, the simulation has given a flavour of the kind of simulation, which could be used to estimate the viability in a more complicated case. © 2006 Taylor & Francis Group.