Hazard analysis techniques, methods and approaches: A review

Hazard analysis (HA) is an indispensable task during the specification and development of safety-critical systems. It involves identifying potential forms of harm, their effects, causal factors, and the level of risk associated with them. Systems are always vulnerable to mishaps, hazards, or risks that result in system failures, resulting in injuries, loss, and damage. Even though previous studies have made a significant contribution to the study of hazard analysis, little effort has been made to give an overview of the common HA techniques, highlighting their responsibilities, advantages, and disadvantages. Thus, this paper aims to focus on and feature the existing HA techniques along with their respective functions. An overall picture of the advantages and disadvantages of listed HA techniques is presented as well in this paper. Such a study may be utilized as a guide to aid researchers and practitioners in understanding hazard analysis. The investigation is conducted using a process-oriented approach that consists of three steps: formulation of the research questions, the gathering of related studies, and the analysis of the extracted studies. The study revealed a total of 22 HA techniques. A further study is to propose and carry out a systematic literature review to identify to what extent the hazard analysis techniques have been implemented and evaluated in case studies

Hazard analysis for the requirements specification of safety-critical systems using the combination of FHA and FTA techniques

Hazard Analysis (HA) is a crucial process for identifying and mitigating risks associated with systems development. However, current HA techniques suffer from several limitations, including a lack of preliminary hazard identification and inadequate hazard documentation, which can lead to system breakdowns. Therefore, this research aims to enhance HA techniques by addressing these limitations by conducting HA in requirement specification and producing a more comprehensive hazard log. To achieve this aim, a research methodology consisting of three phases was designed. Phase 1 involved analyzing existing HA techniques and identifying gaps in hazard analysis. Phase 2 involved developing a combined hazard analysis technique that addresses these key limitations by integrating functional hazard analysis (FHA) and fault tree analysis (FTA) techniques. The proposed technique is intended for use during the requirement specification of system development to produce a comprehensive hazard log. In Phase 3, the proposed technique was evaluated through a case study of a generic patient-controlled analgesia pump model. The performance of the proposed technique was evaluated using the F1-score measure, precision, and accuracy. Four evaluation methods were used to compare the results of single FHA, single FTA, using both FHA and FTA, and combining FHA and FTA techniques. The results showed that the combined FHA and FTA technique achieved the highest performance value of 0.96 for accuracy and 0.98 for precision, recall, and F1-score measure. This concludes that though individually FHA produces a large output data while FTA is not a preliminary technique yet both of them complements each other to achieve the aim of conducting HA in requirement specification and produce a minimalized and comprehensive hazard log. Based on these findings, the combined FHA and FTA technique is recommended for implementation during the requirement specification of systems development to identify hazards and produce a comprehensive hazard log. Future directions for research could include automating the technique to identify hazards by analyzing system functions using the causal factors in terms of variables