7. Summary

The aim of this dossier was to address the concepts and challenges of operational safety. We have seen that this is an all-encompassing concept, which cannot be characterized by a single parameter, but by several constituent parameters: reliability, maintainability, availability and safety. We have also shown that these components are generally not totally independent.

• The user or operator should be able to express his requirements in terms of these parameters: level of reliability or rate of availability required, maximum downtime, acceptable level of risk, etc.

• The designer (or even the user) will have to check that the chosen solutions meet these needs. To do this, the methods and tools of dependability must be applied. These include, but are not limited to: functional analysis,...