Managing risk and promoting safety is paramount in engineering practice. The Academy has published documents on how risks are managed and a safety culture is promoted. The Academy has followed and supported the work of independent inquiries into disasters such as Grenfell, and is currently working with others in the engineering professional landscape on solutions such as the Building Safety Regulations Act 2022.
Safer Complex Systems
As part of the its Engineering X activity, in Spring 2019 the Academy launched a £5 million five-year mission, Safer Complex Systems, to enhance the safety of complex infrastructure systems globally. See more here: Safer Complex Systems.
A series of reports were produced in 2003 on the methods for managing risk, and the complexities posed by managing risk in systems that involve people as operators and users:
- Humans in complex engineering systems
- The societal aspects of risk
- Risks posed by humans in the control loop
- Common methodologies for risk assessment and management
The publication of these reports was followed by a debate on risk, entitled The Risk Debate: Trust me, I’m an engineer, held in 2004, and a workshop on The Economics and Morality of Safety in 2006.
In 2011, the Academy convened a meeting on the engineering profession’s response to the Haddon-Cave inquiry into the Nimrod disaster and looking at the broader issue of the profession’s commitment to safety in engineered systems.