Integrating safety into the design process: elements and concepts relative to the working situation

The fact that the design of equipment and machines can no longer be separated from the concept of human safety has led to criteria linked to exploitation being taken into account during their design. This paper firstly looks at the problem of integrating safety into the design as early as possible, and goes on to review the state of the art and examine the work known to have been carried out in this respect. The area of application of our research is then presented. The production system analysed is an offset printing line. We present the results of an analysis of the design process employed in the design and integration company and of how safety is integrated into the design process. The ultimate aim is to provide designers the means of integrating the potential work context at the start of the design process. We propose a system model by defining the working situation and the elements characterising this situation as well as the concepts relative to these elements. Entity-relationship formalism is used to present the model, which is an extension of the generic model proposed by Harani (Harani, Y., 1997. Une approche Multi-Modeles pour la capitalisation des connaissances dans le domaine de la conception. PhD Report, Institut National Polytechnique de Grenoble, Laboratoire de Genie Industriel et de Production Mecanique, Grenoble, France). (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.