David Wichner Profile

Developing Safety Management Systems for the Future

Safety Management Systems (SMSs) have been used in many safety-critical industries for decades and are now also being developed and deployed in the emergent Autonomous Vehicle (AV) sector. Industries employing SMS have established frameworks that are apparently tailored to their specific context. And while most of these frameworks extend well beyond four elements of the aviation industry SMS, they differ in many significant ways.

In general they are all intended to help mitigate broadly applicable management system contributions to accidents, yet why are there such wide variations in content and structures and are there lessons that can be learned from these different frameworks? In this context, there may be value in establishing requirements for what should be included in a holistic SMS framework and how they should be structured. Improvements to SMS framework content and structure consistency would reduce confusion and adoption effort for companies obligated to integrate more than one management system.

This presentation outlines a proposed SMS framework for the AV industry based on proposed taxonomy development and validation criteria and provides rationale for such an approach.