Utilizing Systems Engineering and Risk Science Approaches in the Development of Safety Standards
Open AccessSafety standards are intended to protect consumers and users against the risks associated with the product covered by the standard. There are known hazards and resultant harmful occurrences, including injuries and fatalities, associated with consumer products that can impact the quality of the standard. The development of a safety standard currently relies on inputs from experts including researchers, data scientists, safety engineers, regulators, consumers, manufacturers, and many other stakeholder groups to ensure that the standard is effective. Risk reduction as it pertains to eliminating and controlling product hazards is necessary to mitigate harmful occurrences that are directly tied to the quality of a safety standard. The application of risk reduction methodologies such as risk matrices and Failure Modes and Effects Analysis are not used in the development process for new safety standards. Utilizing consumer product reports, this work will analyze injury and fatality data by applying systems engineering techniques such as risk matrices and Failure Modes and Effects Analyses to integrate risk reduction methods for hazard mitigation at the onset of new safety standards development. A decision support tool will complement existing standards development processes by providing decision criteria at the front end of the process using hazard as well as injury data to mitigate consumer product risk and improve the quality of product safety standards. Case studies using retrospective data from the Consumer Products Safety Commission validate the effectiveness of the tool while providing semi-quantitative input to the decision-making process which is essential for the development of high-quality safety standards.
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