The complexity of technical systems has increased over the past decades, and will continue to do so in the future. Individuals and companies, as well as society in general, are becoming more and more dependant on such complex systems, which are often developed to avoid or control potentially dangerous situations. Application areas for these systems cover almost all aspects of modern life, including control of transportation systems, telecommunication systems, and process control systems.
Many of these systems are safety-critical, and reliability is an important factor of these systems. The systems may comprise a number of mechanical and electrical subsystems, programmable electronic subsystems, software, and human operators. Customers and users of critical systems put reliability requirements upon the systems they are going to purchase and/or use. The suppliers have to design their systems according to requirements, and to verify that the requirements are met. The importance of formal methods has been recognized, e.g., in the standards IEC 61508 (for quantification of safety of E/E/PE safety-related systems), and EN 50126 (for railway applications).
Tools and methods for establishing the reliability of safety-critical systems include fault trees, event trees, Petri nets, and Markov models; methods which all have a long history in quantifying "classical" reliability aspects. In the modern society, there is also an interest in quantifying security factors like reliability and resilience towards intentional acts of sabotage (e.g., hacking), which has resulted in increased focus on techniques from game theory.
The purpose of the seminar was to bring together specialists with systems analysis, safety and security background in order to exploit synergies and/or investigate limitations in the application of these and related techniques to safety-critical systems. The seminar was proposed to address both methodological as well as applicative issues.

Among methodological issues that were addressed at the 30th ESReDA seminar are:
      a) risk analysis, demand rate analysis, analysis of consequences;
      b) stochastic models for reliability, redundancy, common cause failures;
      c) developing overall safety requirements;
      d) reliability of software, testing of software;
      e) reliability of hardware, testing of hardware;
      f) reliability data, data sources, data analysis;
      g) intentional acts (sabotage), resilience, secure safety-systems;
      h) practical use of models for decision support.

Domains of application include (but are not limited to):

•  Aviation (Air traffic control systems) 
•  Railway (Signalling systems)
•  Process Plants (Process control systems; emergency shutdown systems)
•  Nuclear Power Plants (nuclear reactor control systems)
•  Infrastructure (Emergency services dispatch systems; Electricity generation, transmission and distribution; Telecommunications)
•  Medicine (e.g., Heart-lung machines)

About 50 people attended the seminar that was held at “SINTEF Technology and Society”, in Trondheim, Norway, during June 7 + 8, 2006.
 
Location:
SINTEF, Trondheim, Norway.

http://www.sintef.no/sipaa_eng.

Technical Program Committee:
Lars Bodsberg (SINTEF, N)
Sergio Contini (JRC, I)
Micaela Demichela (Politecnico di Torino, I)
Mohamed Eid (ESReDA/CEA, F)
Erik Korssjøen (Kongsberg Maritime, N)
Henrik Kortner (ESReDA/DNV, N)
Helge Langseth* (SINTEF, N)
Jean Remi Masse (Hispano-Suiza, F)
Lars Pettersson (Swedpower, S)
Patrick Raymond (CEA, F)
Morten Sørum (Statoil, N)

*Program Committee chairperson

Opening of the Seminar:
Lars Bodsberg, Research Director, SINTEF