Safety Engineering - a Perspective on Systems Engineering

The 20th annual Safety-critical Systems Symposium, including topics such as goal-based safety standards, safety and cyber defence, bayesian belief networks for dependability cases, developing and validating safety critical software, railway safety decision making, EMC for functional safety and safety of unmanned aerial systems.

Derek Fowler is a systems engineer, project manager and safety practitioner with over 40 years professional experience covering all aspects of a typical system life cycle. Since 1990, following a technical career in military aviation and the avionics industry, Derek has been involved in safety management, systems assurance and project management on major aviation projects, initially in the ATM field, with the UK National Air Traffic Services, as a senior project manager and then Deputy Director for Oceanic Systems. His considerable experience in systems engineering and interest in system safety were then combined, in 1998, when he took up successive senior technical positions with two of the UK’s leading systems / safety consultancy companies. For the past 8 years he has operated as an independent aviation safety consultant, through his own company, JDF Consultancy. He is widely recognised among his professional colleagues as a leading authority on most aspects of safety management and has carried out safety assessment, safety case development and safety training assignments for major procurement organisations, service providers, system suppliers and safety regulators. Most recently, he has developed a radically new approach to safety assessment for the pan-European ATM safety organisation EUROCONTROL, which is now being adopted for the European Commission’s Single European Sky ATM R&D (SESAR) programme and has attracted considerable interest from the equivalent programme (Next Gen) in the USA. He has many papers on risk and safety issues to his credit, most of them on the development of safety engineering techniques, based on good systems-engineering practice, to keep pace with the increasingly rapid changes in aviation technology and operations.