The article entitled Principles of Engineering Safety: Risk and Uncertainty Reduction

written by authors Niklas Moller and Sven Ove Hansson seeks to construct four general principles
from the list of 24 principles referred to in the literature of safety engineering from which they are
categorized. These principles are realize by understanding thoroughly the background of decision
theoretical distinctions that are made in risk assessment and risk analysis. And then divided into
four major categories: Inherently safe design, Safety reserves, Safe fail and Procedural safeguards.

The aim of this article is to provide a general categorization of safety principles base on
the list of 24 principles referred to in the literature of safety engineering. The title of the article
precisely state the subject of the paper. The abstract, brief however, does accurately presented a
summary of the long article. The statement of purpose matches the aim in the introduction and the
sequence of all information in the statement of introduction coherently lead to the purpose of the
study. The author uses a quantitative, probabilistic methodology in carrying out his study such
methodology includes Probabilistic Risk Analysis (PRA) and Probabilistic Safety Analysis (PSA)
which are valid methods to be employed since it has a substantial justification in the Bayesian
framework wherein all rational decisions are presented with precise probability which is
considered as the sole means for expressing uncertainty Aven [20] (p. xii). The discussion of the
four categories made in sections 4-6 are very well in detailed and the cited examples of every
section are very much useful in understanding well the concept of the topic being implied making
his points clear and pertinent. Moreover, the discussion of these principles conform with the
conception of safety engineering as devoted to the reduction not only the risk but also of the
uncertainty.

I noticed that some of the words in this article that are supposed to spell with z are spelled
with s instead such as categorising instead of categorizing. But over-all the thoughts of his
article are well organized under the appropriate headings in which the article is divided logically
into seven numbered sections that is for section 1 introduction, 2 for the overview of the safety
principles as well as the four overarching principles, 3 is the presentation of risk assessment
terminology, the detailed different classes of safety principles are discussed in sections 4-6 and
general conclusions are then summarized in section 7. Though there are studies that accounts for
categorizing safety measures such as safety consideration Koivistio [4, p.18] divided into three
different types (1) adherence to good practice, (2) safety analysis and (3) inherently safe design;
Bahr [5]based on NASA [6]suggests categorizing hazard reduction into the following
ordering of importance: (1) Designing out the hazard (2) Safety devices (3) Warning devices
(4) Special procedures and training, the author still did point out the economy of his article with
logic and clarity. The author presents to us a well presented table together with a brief description
of summary of the 24 engineering safety principles that are divided into four different categories:
(1) inherently safe design, (2) safety reserves, (3) safe fail and (4) procedural safeguards. The
conclusion suggests that the shown concepts of epistemic uncertainty can be a useful tool for
categorizing practical strategies in engineering in which this article makes a signicant
contribution to human knowledge and can be cited for future references.