[SystemSafety] Making Standards available .....

[Peter Bernard Ladkin]

On 2016-05-12 00:49 , Les Chambers wrote:
> Some information has such societal benefit that it must be free. 

That's likely so, but I am not sure for a number of reasons that IEC 61508 quite falls into that
category. The phrase does capture, though, an anomalous situation which is not yet recognised by
everyone on this list. I am gratified increasingly to see others such as Les and Thomas grasping the
nettle firmly.

I don't think the issue will go away. And I don't think it should go away.

There is a document purporting to represent the state of the practice in the development of the
E/E/PE parts of safety-critical systems. Nowadays, that is pretty much all safety-critical
engineered systems.

Getting safety-critical systems right is, um, critical. By which I mean socially critical. We have
enough people ploughing their cars into groups of pedestrians that we don't need the cars to do it
by themselves. Not to speak of what happens when Fukushima Daichi NPP floods.

This document is of international legal significance. In many countries, it represents the
touchstone for whether you are criminally prosecuted for a programmable-electrotechnical system
failure which caused injury or death. In at least those countries, it also represents the criteria
under which you (or your company) may be convicted by a court for unlawful killing.

Pretty serious stuff. You'd think it would be a basic part of the education of any electrotechnical
engineer. But it's not. The main reason is that most engineers and engineering professors, and
pretty much all students, can't get hold of it.

That is a fact which some people here are apparently unwilling to concede. They say: You can buy it
(it'll only cost you a quarter of a new car). Your company can buy it. It's in the library. If it's
not in the library, it's in one a train ride away. It's there. Make the effort.

We could test the practicality of this suggestion easily. Let me propose the following game to
someone who does not now have access to a copy either on hisher bookshelf or computer or through the
company. I give out a clause number. You get a week to say here what that clause says. I'll give out
numbers at the rate of one a day. Let's see how long this game lasts. I would guess not long enough
for this list to violate copyright in any substantial way. [1]

It is a basic principle in many countries that the law of the land is available in source to its
citizens, either freely or at a nominal charge. Some would say that that is a basic principle of
democracy (although not all countries are democratic, most like to claim that they are; it's seen as
a Good Thing for rulers to have The People's Backing). Because of its status as a touchstone for
prosecutions, IEC 61508 is one step removed from being a de facto law [2].

Not all standards are alike. IEC 61508 is not like a standard for electrical-system sockets in
buildings or for the plugs that fit them. The device itself is all you need to be able to check if
it conforms, a phenomenon validated by business travelers the world over on a daily basis. But to
check if kit conforms to IEC 61508 is a specialist professional skill which costs great expense to
exercise. And, unlike plugs, retroactive conformance is all but impossible to ascertain.

This situation is deliberately maintained by an elite. I am part of that elite. I am a volunteer
worker on that standard. I'm very lucky. Germany basically lets anyone with appropriate technical
background and sufficient motivation participate as a guest in standards committees. Thereby I have
free personal access to what must amount by now to a six-figure-sum of intellectual property [3] [4]
[5]. Most countries don't have comparable arrangements, and I didn't know about any of this when I
chose to come here over two decades ago. Most professional engineers don't have such opportunity.

People who are part of the elite don't think of themselves as such. I talk about matters concerning
IEC 61508 with other members of the elite many times a week. It's like talking about the weather,
our kid's schooling or suchlike. We all share the privilege. Such conversations are difficult to
impossible on this list because most people don't have access. That is, access to the document which
is supposedly the foundation of the professional activity of almost everyone here (except the
aerospace, automotive and medical people).

There is also the issue of technical quality. Quality through obscurity is about as effective as its
companion, security through obscurity [6].

The key questions are thus. Is this what we think is the best way to determine and exercise
engineering best practice on system safety? If not, how can we improve it?

PBL

Footnotes

[1] Let's also compare this game with that knowledge represented, say, by Bedford and Cooke's text
on Probabilistic Risk Analysis or Birolini's text on Reliability Engineering. I'll give out a
section number. You quote me the first two sentences of that section. That game, in contrast, would
be pointless.

[2] Its rail equivalents, CENELEC 50128 and 50129, actually are law in Germany.

[3] And which, I assure German taxpayers, does get passed on to students who take our uni courses.
Which will end, after fifteen years, probably permanently, in two months time. Some of those
students and former students have contributed to the standardisation process in return. Thank you
Chris Goeker, Hauke Kaufhold, Jan Sanders, Tim Schürmann and Bernd Sieker!

[4] A data point. We once gave technical advice on a very specific piece of relatively simple, and
small, physical kit which had gone wrong. Just obtaining the standards pertaining to that specific
kit, its use, installation and maintenance, cost our clients a five-figure amount.

[5] It is well protected. There is a blue folder which says I shall not give it to third parties, to
whose conditions I have legally committed myself.

[6] There are notable exceptions. William Kahan won the Turing Award for, amongst other things, his
technical contributions to the IEEE standard 754 on floating-point arithmetic for microprocessors (
See for example
http://scholar.google.de/scholar_url?url=http://i-n-d-e-p-t-h.googlecode.com/files/IEEE754.pdf&hl=de&sa=X&scisig=AAGBfm3ZeM2pqTnY4wkwL68WLh_miz2U9Q&nossl=1&oi=scholarr&ved=0ahUKEwiH8uWdu9PMAhVJ2hoKHSeXCa4QgAMIKigCMAA
  ). This standard, negotiated in committee during the 1970's by my grad-school pal Jerry Coonen who
got his PhD for this work with Kahan, is of the very highest technical quality, as acknowledged
clearly through Coonen's PhD with the then-leading math department in the world, and Kahan's award.
That was my introduction to engineering standards. Nothing else has quite lived up......

Prof. Peter Bernard Ladkin, Faculty of Technology, University of Bielefeld, 33594 Bielefeld, Germany
Je suis Charlie
Tel+msg +49 (0)521 880 7319  www.rvs.uni-bielefeld.de





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