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Safe System has been the dominant approach to road safety in Victoria for over fifteen years, guiding the development and implementation of policy. Limited attention has been paid to the development and application of Safe System in a public policy setting. The aims of this research were to describe the intentions of Safe System in Victoria, and analyse how well this aligns with models of successful public policy. Using a qualitative approach, semi-structured interviews were undertaken with Australian and international experts (n = 10). These experts represented a range of organisations and leadership levels that were either directly involved in the development or had a detailed understanding of the development of Safe System in Victoria. The interview results were analysed using a policy success model. The findings suggested that Safe System can provide a framework to address road safety in Victoria, however successful public policy needs to ensure that the development of policy addresses the identified problem and that the results are maintained for some time. Safe System meets some of these requirements, but principally lacks explanation for how its overarching approach is meant to be understood and utilised. Practically, road safety professionals need to clarify the purpose of the Safe System concept in order for it to be successfully integrated into public policy. Whilst Safe System requires additional clarification, it has garnered additional interest and debate in road safety and from this perspective has advanced public policy.

Many countries and international organizations have put a significant amount of effort into improving road traffic safety by setting their own road traffic safety goals and strategies. This study aims to provide a conceptual framework for road traffic safety through an international comparison of traffic safety goals and strategies. Such a comparison can help improve mutual understanding and communication among stakeholders in different countries and international organizations. Based on a review of previous traffic safety literature and comparing traffic safety strategies of several different countries and international organizations, this study proposes a conceptual framework for road traffic safety consisting of a common vision, traffic safety indicators, a safe system including the 3Es and some additional Es, and a traffic safety culture, which is the basis of the framework.

Since 2015, there have been more than 35,000 fatalities annually due to crashes on United States roads [1], [2]. Typically, road departure crashes account for less than 10% of all annual crash occupants yet comprise nearly one third of all crash fatalities in the US [3]. In the year 2020, road departure crashes accounted for 50% of crash fatalities [2]. Road departure crashes are characterized by a vehicle leaving the intended lane of travel, departing the roadway, and striking a roadside object, such as a tree or pole, or roadside condition, such as a slope or body of water. One strategy currently implemented to mitigate these types of crashes is the use of roadside barriers. Roadside barriers, such as metal guardrails, concrete barriers, and cable barriers, are designed to reduce the severity of road departure crashes by acting as a shield between the departed vehicle and more hazardous roadside obstacles. Much like new vehicles undergo regulatory crash tests, barriers must adhere to a set of crash test procedures to ensure the barriers perform as intended. Currently, the procedures for full-scale roadside barrier crash tests used to evaluate the crash performance of roadside safety hardware are outlined in The Manual for Assessing Safety Hardware (MASH) [4]. During roadside barrier tests, the assessment of occupant injury risk is crucial, as the purpose of the hardware is to prevent the vehicle from colliding with a more detrimental roadside object, all the while minimizing, and not posing additional, risk to the occupants. Unlike the new vehicle regulatory crash tests conducted by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), MASH does not require the use of instrumented anthropomorphic test devices (ATD). Instead, one of the prescribed occupant risk assessment methods in MASH is the flail space model (FSM), which was introduced in 1981 and models an occupant as an unrestrained point mass. The FSM is comprised of two crash severity metrics that can be calculated using acceleration data from the test vehicle. Each metric is prescribed a maximum threshold in MASH and if either threshold is exceeded during a crash test the test fails due to high occupant injury risk. Since the inception of the FSM metrics and their thresholds, the injury prediction capabilities of these metrics have only been re-investigated in the frontal crash mode, despite MASH prescribing an oblique 25-degree impact angle for passenger vehicle barrier tests. The focus of this dissertation was to use EDR data from real-world crashes to assess the current relevance of roadside barrier crash test occupant risk assessment methods to the modern vehicle fleet and occupant population. Injury risk prediction models were constructed for the two FSM-based metrics and five additional crash severity metrics for three crash modes: frontal, side, and oblique. For each crash mode and metric combination, four injury prediction models were constructed: one to predict probability of injury to any region of the body and three to predict probability of injury to the head/face, neck, and thorax regions. While the direct application of these models is to inform future revisions of MASH crash test procedures, the developed models have valuable applications for other areas of transportation safety besides just roadside safety. The final two chapters of this dissertation explore these additional applications: 1) assessing the injury mitigation effectiveness of an advanced automatic emergency braking system, and 2) informing speed limit selection that supports the safe system approach. The findings in this dissertation indicate that both the FSM and additional crash severity metrics do a reasonable job predicting occupant injury risk in oblique crashes. One of the additional metrics performs better than the two FSM metrics. Additionally, several occupant factors, such as belt status and age, play significant roles in occupant risk prediction. These findings have important implications for future revisions of MASH, which could benefit from considering additional metrics and occupant factors in the occupant risk assessment procedures. Doctor of Philosophy Every year, there are more than 35,000 fatalities due to crashes on United States roads. While there are many different types of crashes, there is a small collection of crash types that are responsible for the majority of these fatalities. One of the worst crash types is a road departure crash. Road departure crashes describe when a vehicle leaves the roadway and collides with an object off the roadway (such as a tree, pole, or ditch). Road departure crashes typically comprise 10% of crashes but are responsible for more than 30% of the annual crash fatalities. In 2020, road departure crashes were responsible for 50% of the 39,000 fatalities. One strategy that is currently used to reduce road departure fatalities is the use of roadside barriers. Common roadside barrier types include metal guardrails, concrete barriers, and cable guardrails, and are used to prevent vehicles that are departing the roadway from hitting an object that would be more dangerous than the barrier. To ensure barriers successfully protect the vehicle and vehicle occupants from heightened danger, they are crash tested in scenarios that are designed to mimic real-world crashes. The Manual for Assessing Safety Hardware (MASH) is the document that currently outlines the details necessary to conduct one of these crash tests. During roadside barrier tests, it is crucial to determine whether occupants are at risk of injury or fatality. For a variety of reasons, barrier tests do not use the traditional crash test dummies, which are designed to replicate human presence in a crash vehicle. Instead, MASH recommends using vehicle velocity data to assess how much risk is posed to an occupant. Using this velocity data, two values can be computed and if either value exceeds the maximum values provided in MASH, the crash test fails due to high occupant risk. The suggestion to use velocity data to assess occupant risk was first introduced in 1981. Since then, there have been significant advances in vehicle design, barrier design, and occupants' willingness to partake in safe habits, such as wearing seatbelts. Therefore, it is necessary to determine if the occupant risk values used in MASH are still applicable today. The focus of this dissertation was to use real-world crash data to assess the current relevance of roadside barrier crash test occupant risk values. The results presented in this dissertation can be used to select new occupant risk values in future versions of MASH. The findings within this dissertation show that the current methods in MASH do a good job estimating an occupant's risk of injury. Additionally, the findings show that certain occupant factors, such as the age of an occupant and whether the occupant is belted, help to more accurately estimate occupant injury risk. This finding has important implications for MASH, which does not currently consider different occupant conditions.

Dedicated road markings for motorcyclists were installed on the approach to demanding bends at 10 sites across the West Highlands of Scotland. These road markings were designed as Perceptual Rider Information for Maximising Expertise and Enjoyment (PRIMEs) which presented a series of ‘gateway’ markings to encourage safer riding. Video data were collected to measure motorcycle speed, position, braking and use of the road markings, before and after the PRIMEs were installed. A total of 12,949 motorcyclists were observed. Speed reductions were observed across four of the 10 sites, changes in lateral position at the final PRIME gateway marking and apex of the bend were observed across all 10 sites and seven sites respectively; reduced braking was observed at two sites and there was an increase in the use of PRIME road markings across eight of the 10 sites. These findings are discussed in relation to the ‘Safe System’ approach to improving motorcycle safety.

With increase in traffic volume across the globe traffic safety has come into highlight and become a major concern. Apparently, with due increase in traffic volume resulting in higher road accidents which considerably causes negative impact on economic growth, public health and general welfare of wellbeing. In the present scenario challenges are faced to mitigate the traffic volume and by making road users aware with road safety parameters which may results in less road fatalities. The root cause of an accidents intends to perception, intellection emotion and violation. The approach towards this research is to get minimal setback/casualties of the road. In order to gain the best possible course of action, the stretch of 8 KM of National highway (NH-66) situated in a plain terrain in the district of Alapphuza, Kerala India. To begin with, accident data has been collected from NHAI office and Police station of above location with proper analysis by Accident Severity Index (ASI) method has been carried out. Adding to an idea, location of Black Spot has been identified by ASI method. Based on Severity of accident short term and long-term measures has been adopted. Eventually, after analyzing short term measures 10 black spot location along with the estimate has been worked out.

This article discusses the concept of a secure system. On the example of the «Swiss cheese» model, the central principles of a safe system. A comparative analysis of the traditional approach to road safety and the safe system is carried out. As a result of the analysis, the advantages of a safe system that can significantly reduce the level of accidents on the roads are identified. Key words: safe system, road-traffic safety, Vision Zero safety concept, zero mortality.

Providing a “safe system of work” is the essence of the general duties that employers have to their employees under workplace health and safety regulations. Despite this, consistent and appropriate definition of what constitutes a safe system of work is almost non-existent. Available definitions tend to confuse a safe system of work with management practices intended to bring about a safe system, or conflate the broad system suggested in general duties clauses with procedures or work methods that are focused on particular hazards or tasks. This article develops a definition of safe systems of work which recognises the broad scope of the concept and includes psychological health and return to work processes. This definition can be used by a range of stakeholders to better communicate the scope of occupational health and safety duties and more consistently assess whether a safe system has been provided both before and after incidents occur.

As part of the Northern and South-Eastern Suburban Roads Upgrade packages, Major Road Projects Victoria has sought to incorporate road safety metrics into the tender designs review process. The Australian Road Research Board adapted the Safe System Assessment Framework (Austroads 2016) to meet this need. Twelve road projects were assessed to provide baselines scores for the reference designs. The submitted tender designs will then be reassessed to provide an assessment of road safety in the designs. This work provided an extension in use of Safe System Assessment Framework as well as insight into current gaps in road safety design practice.

In 2016 in New Zealand, pedestrians accounted for 7.6% (n=25) of all road fatalities and 6.6% (n=257) of serious injuries (Ministry of Transport, 2017). The aim of this research was to analyse a sample of pedestrian deaths and serious injury (DSI) cases to understand the contribution of Safe System gaps in serious harm outcomes. A sample of 100 pedestrian fatality and 200 serious injury crash reports from 2013-2017 were analysed to identify the contribution of the four Safe System pillars (roads and roadsides, vehicle, speed environment, user) in each crash case. The research identified common crash scenarios and highlighted the need for improvements in speed management, safer vehicles, safety campaigns, and infrastructure design. In addition, the research identified latent high-order sociotechnical system factors that obstruct the mechanisms to effectively address these Safe System issues and which ultimately perpetuate the occurrence of pedestrian DSIs.

Research question What are the trends in patient characteristics, effectiveness and safety of assisted reproductive technology (ART) performed in Latin America over the past three decades, as well as the detailed outcomes of procedures initiated in 2018? Design Retrospective collection of multinational data including epidemiology and outcomes of ART performed between 1990 and 2018. Results Over these 30 years we report 955,117 initiated cycles, 191,191 deliveries and 238,045 live births. In 1990, 66.5% of women were ≤34 years and 8.7% ≥40 years; in 2018, 26.4% of women were ≤34 years and 32.0% were ≥40 years. In 1990, 60.4% of transfers included ≥3 embryos, falling to 13.5% in 2018, and single embryo transfer (SET) increased from 13.8% to 30.4% between 1990 and 2018. Delivery rate per fresh transfer increased from approximately 17% in the 1990s to 25% in 2018, with a meaningful drop in high-order multiples, from 5–9% in the 1990s to 0.4% in 2018. This drop is associated with increasing use of frozen embryo transfer (FET) (57% in 2018) compared with 10% in 2000. In 2018, delivery rate in FET was 28.3%, reaching 31.2% in freeze-all cycles; and the cumulative live birth rate (fresh + FET) was 41.9%. Elective SET also increased, from 0.9% in 2010 to 10% in 2018. The delivery rate in elective SET (31.7%) was only 5.4% lower than elective double embryo transfer (DET) (37.1%); however, multiple births increased from 2.1% to 25.5% twins and 0.4% triplets in elective DET. Conclusion The Latin American Registry of Assisted Reproduction (RLA) celebrates 30 years of voluntary reporting from a total of nearly 200 centres in 15 countries. This South–South Cooperation network has proven to be an efficient and safe system for technological transfer and regional growth.

The health community uses a harm reduction model that deals with harm reduction at four levels: conceptual, practical, policy, and programmatic. The road safety community has adopted the Safe System as their harm reduction model. The Safe System is underpinned by the key principles: people make mistakes, the human body has limited biomechanical tolerance, there is a shared responsibility for creating a safer system and we aspire for zero death and serious injury in transport. The interacting elements/levers to achieve these principles are road and roadsides (infrastructure), safe people, safe vehicles, and safe speeds. Using on-road collectors as a specific example, the relationship between the health-based harm reduction model and the Safe System reveals that the Safe System assumes the conceptual, practical and policy levels to be pre-determined, and thus restricts itself to the programmatic level of the health-based harm reduction model.

Goal. To analyze the long-term data on the development and application of biological plant protection products in Ukraine. Methods. Micro­biological, biochemical, entomological, field, mathematical-statistical, and information-analytical. Results. It is established that in Ukraine for the last 20 years the areas of cultivated agricultural lands treated with biological means of plant protection against pests decreased from 8.5% (2000) to 3.6% (2019), and in 2006 the share of the areas treated with bioresources was the lowest (2.9%). Most biological drugs are used against mouse-like animals, gnawing and leaf-eating moths, stem butterfly and pest complex in vegetable and grain agrocnosis, and in orchards. Scientific developments on the biological method of plant protection are given. An ecologically safe system of protection of vegetable crops of open and closed soil is developed and tested. The search for highly effective strains of microorganisms for the creation and development of new biological preparations is carried out. Methods of step-by-step selection with the determination of productive monoisolates to obtain production strains of entomopathogens have been studied. The deep technology of low-tonnage production of the biological product Trikhodermin-R for the conditions of bio laboratories of Ukraine has been improved. Conclusions. It is established that the cultivated areas treated with biological plant protection products decreased every year and in 2019 amounted to 1.8 million hectares out of 49.8 million hectares of all cultivated areas. The Institute of plant protection of NAAS has developed an environmentally friendly system of protection of vegetable crops in open and closed soil against pests and created a collection of highly active and productive strains of entomopathogens, microorganisms-antagonists, predatory nematophage fungi — producers of biological drugs, plant protection products in Ukraine.

The development of new video assisted surgical technologies has modified the interactions and the communication between the surgeon and the nurses. If the surgeon is cut off his surgical environment by his enhanced focus, the nurse, who has a central place in the OR, gets a new role enriched with an environmental survey and the realization of gestures out of operator's visual field. There is therefore a need for a safe system interaction and communication inspired by aeronautical and industrial sectors to reassure those professionals despite a lack of awareness among some of them. This safe communication is unnatural, especially during the learning phase. In this way, it must be taught as a priority even before acquiring the technical skills.

Due to high toxicity to mammals and hazard to the ecosystem, parathion has been banned or limited for use in many countries. It is essential to ensure food safety by parathion suspecting. On-site testing, as a critical component of the food chain safe system, plays a major role in the protection of food safety and human health. In this study, based on monoclonal antibody (Mab), a rapid and sensitive quantum dot submicrobead–based immunochromatographic assay (QB-ICA) was developed for the on-site determination of parathion in agricultural products. The established QB-ICA exhibited good linearity over the range of parathion from 0.7 to 13.0 ng mL−1, with half inhibitory concentration (IC50) of 2.48 ng mL−1 and visual detection limits of 6.25 ng mL−1. The testing process could be accomplished within 15 min, and no cross-reactivities with other organophosphorus pesticides were observed. Three kinds of agricultural products (rice, vegetable, and apple) were spiked and analyzed via QB-ICA for method validation; meanwhile, the comparison was conducted between QB-ICA and gas chromatography (GC). The results revealed that the recovery ranged from 85.23 to 111.4%, with the coefficient of variations (CV) less than 11%, suggesting that the developed QB-ICA is practical and reliable for use. This study provides an alternative approach for on-site detection of parathion, which shows great promise to be further used in the surveillance of food and the environment.

The Hague Conference on Private International Law has signed the Final Act of a new international convention designed to circumvent the usual obstacles to the international circulation of judgments. The 2019 Convention on the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Judgments in Civil or Commercial Matters aims at mitigating uncertainties and risks associated with international trade and other civil relationships by setting forth a simple and safe system according to which foreign judgments can easily circulate from country to country. The purpose of this article is to record the historical moment of the negotiations that took place at The Hague Conference, as well as to pinpoint how consumer cases will be dealt with by the Convention, as regulated in Article 5(2).

While absolute injury numbers are widely used as a road safety indicator, they do not fully account for the likelihood of an injury given a certain level of exposure. Adjusting crash and injury rates for travel exposure can measure the magnitude of travel activity leading to crash outcomes and provide a more comprehensive indicator of safety. Fatal and serious injury (FSI) numbers were adjusted by three measures of travel exposure to estimate crash and injury rates across nine travel modes in the Australian state of Victoria. While car drivers accounted for the highest number of injuries across the three modes, their likelihood of being killed or seriously injured was substantially lower than that of motorcyclists across all exposure measures. Cyclists accounted for fewer injuries than car passengers and pedestrians but had a higher risk per exposure. The results varied by both injury severity and exposure measure. The results of this study will assist with high level transport planning by allowing for the investigation of the changes in travel-related FSI resulting from proposed travel mode shifts driven by safety, environmental reasons or other reasons as part of the holistic goal of transforming the transport system to full compliance with Safe System principles.

At Epiroc’s drill rigs a safe system is installed to make sure the vehicle is driven in a safe manner. In the development both machine tests and hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) tests have been performed but when changes are made the firmware in the safe modules has to be updated. To speed up the process a digital twin would be beneficial. This enables testing of parameters and formulation of criteria detecting faults. The purpose of the work is to develop a digital twin for steering and braking safe functions and evaluate the performance using data from machines as well as data from a HIL-rig. Also, the impact of the hydraulic model used in the HIL-rig is investigated. When the model is built two test cases are used to investigate how well the model replicates the behaviour of the real system and how sensitive it is to what input data is used. The biggest difference in the data is the sampling time, machine logs have 80 ms interval while logs from the rig are logged every 5 ms. It is discovered that some of the fault detection functions work very well no matter what data is used while others must have the better resolution to be trusted. The complexity of the hydraulic model used impacts the pressures but seem to have little effect on which fault codes are activated. With this the main purpose is partly achieved and further investigation is needed before the model can be used for all fault codes.

Safe system programming is often a crucial requirement due to its critical role in system software engineering. Conventional low-level programming languages such as C and assembly are efficient, but their inherent unsafe nature makes it undesirable for security-critical scenarios. Recently, Rust has become a promising alternative for safe system-level programming. While giving programmers fine-grained hardware control, its strong type system enforces many security properties including memory safety. However, Rust's security guarantee is not a silver bullet. Runtime crashes and memory-safety errors still harass Rust developers, causing damaging exploitable vulnerabilities, as reported by numerous studies. In this paper, we present and evaluate MirChecker, a fully automated bug detection framework for Rust programs by performing static analysis on Rust's Mid-level Intermediate Representation (MIR). Based on the observation of existing bugs found in Rust codebases, our approach keeps track of both numerical and symbolic information, detects potential runtime crashes and memory-safety errors by using constraint solving techniques, and outputs informative diagnostics to users. We evaluate MirChecker on both buggy code snippets extracted from existing Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) and real-world Rust codebases. Our experiments show that MirChecker can detect all the issues in our code snippets, and is capable of performing bug finding in real-world scenarios, where it detected a total of 33 previously unknown bugs including 16 memory-safety issues from 12 Rust packages (crates) with an acceptable false-positive rate.

Prognostics and health management (PHM) has become an essential function for safe system operation and scheduling economic maintenance. To date, there has been much research and publications on component-level prognostics. In practice, however, most industrial systems consist of multiple components that are interlinked. This paper aims to provide a review of approaches for system-level prognostics. To achieve this goal, the approaches are grouped into four categories: health index-based, component RUL-based, influenced component-based, and multiple failure mode-based prognostics. Issues of each approach are presented in terms of the target systems and employed algorithms. Two examples of PHM datasets are used to demonstrate how the system-level prognostics should be conducted. Challenges for practical system-level prognostics are also addressed.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) received great attention during the last decade for its capability in handling extreme and harsh environments mission. A quadcopter which is basically a rotary-wing type UAV is widely used commercially due to hover capacity and high maneuverability. Even though the quadcopter has its advantages; this type of UAV has a short flying time. This study proposed a data-driven flight safe system to ensure the quadcopter can finish and return to the home safely. The preliminary experiment was conducted to observe the battery behavior in the various flight speed. The battery model was constructed using the regression approach method. The proposed system calculates the required distance using Haversine and Euclidian equation. The result of experimental shows that our system can prevent the quadcopter to execute the mission if the power source is not enough. The system can prevent flight accidents due to loss of power.

Background Microemulsions drug delivery systems (MDDS) have been known to increase the bioavailability of hydrophobic drugs. The main challenge of the MDDS is the development of an effective and safe system for drug carriage and delivery. Biosurfactants are preferred surface-active molecules because of their lower toxicity and safe characteristics when compared to synthetic surfactants. Glycolipid and lipopeptide are the most common biosurfactants that were tested for MDDS. The main goal of the present systematic review was to estimate the available evidence on the role of biosurfactant in the development of MDDS. Search strategy Literature searches involved the main scientific databases and were focused on the period from 2005 until 2017. The Search filter composed of two items: "Biosurfactant" and/or "Microemulsion." Inclusion criteria Twenty-four studies evaluating the use of biosurfactant in MDDS were eligible for inclusion. Among these 14 were related to the use of glycolipid biosurfactants in the MDDS formulations, while four reported using lipopeptide biosurfactants and six other related review articles. Results According to the output study parameters, biosurfactants acted as active stabilizers, hydrophilic or hydrophobic linkers and safety carriers in MDDS, and among them glycolipid biosurfactants had the most application in MDDS formulations. Conclusion Synthetic surfactants could be replaced by biosurfactants as an effective bio-source for MDDS due to their excellent self-assembling and emulsifying activity properties.

Purpose: Comparison of effective road safety approaches with those of relatively similar countries can be used to identify possibilities for safety improvement. Since there is no clear and comprehensive study of countries' current and successful approaches to road safety in the world, the aim of this study was to identifying common road safety approaches in the world. Methods: This study was performed using scoping review and thematic analysis. The study followed the approach proposed by Arksey and O'Malley. In this study all articles were selected without time limit by searching in the following databases: Web of Science, PubMed, Scopus, ProQuest, and Embase. An initial search of 5612 papers was found and finally, 20 papers met the inclusion criteria and were analyzed. Results: There were different road safety approaches in different countries around the world, which were classified in three themes: traditional approach, systemic approach, and vision zero. The traditional approach includes the sub-theme of the road-user approach, and the causal approach. The systemic approach also includes sub-themes of sustainable safety, safety system, and the United Nations plan for decade of action. Conclusion: A systemic approach to road safety seems to be welcomed by most developed and developing countries, and a paradigm shift towards a safe system has taken place. Also, given the successful results of implementing vision zero in leading countries, most countries are trying to design and implement this approach. Finally, the choice and implementation of road safety approaches varies according to the principles, priorities and infrastructure of each country. Keywords: Road safety, Vision zero, Road traffic injury, Road traffic accident, Approach, Safe system

We discuss safety principles of autonomous driving road vehicles. First, we provide a comparison between principles and experience of autonomous or automatic systems on rails and on the road. An automatic metro operates in a controlled and well-defined environment, passengers and third persons are separated from driving trains by fences, tunnels, etc. A road vehicle operates in a much more complex environment. Further, we discuss safety principles. The application of safety principles (e.g. fail-safe or safe-life) is used to design and implement a safe system that eventually fulfils the requirements of the functional safety standards. The different responsibility of human driver and technical driving system in different automation levels for autonomous driving vehicles require the application of safety principles. We consider, which safety principles have to be applied using general safety principles and analysing the relevant SAE level based on the experience from projects for the five levels of automated driving as defined by the SAE. Depending on the level of automation, the technical systems are implemented as fail-silent, fails-safe or as safe-life.

This study examined driver perceptions of safety at metro and regional intersections with different types of control. Data were collected using an on-line survey with 696 participants drawn from the Royal Automobile Association of South Australia’s Member Panel. Results demonstrate a greater perception of safety associated with the use of roundabouts, yet a reduced perception of safety associated with a lesser known Safe System aligned design of raised plateaus, suggesting a need for greater public awareness of the benefits of less well-known treatments.

The surveys of the bearing and enclosing civil structures damaged after the Chornobyl Unit 4 accident that were conducted by the State Research Institute of Building Structures and Institute for Safety Problems of Nuclear Power Plants from 1995 to 2012 showed that a number of structures were in unstable condition. They include a group of structures that are especially dangerous in terms of the bearing capacity and are very likely to collapse. To ensure safe operation, immediate stabilization measures were developed and successfully implemented at the Shelter in 2005—2008. The justifying calculations show that the structures will comply with nuclear and radiation safety requirements (in terms of stability, bearing capacity etc.) over 15 years. The most unstable structures have to be dismantled by 2023, which is one of the conditions in the strategic plan for further transformation of the Shelter into a safe system. Two stages of safety measures have been defined for the unstable structures to be dismantled. The functional purpose of and climatic impacts on the bearing structures and, as a consequence, the Shelter lifetime are subject to change after stabilization of the unstable structures and installation of the New Safe Confinement (NSC) into the designed position. The paper analyzes scenarios for dismantling of unstable structures, stabilization measures and the probability of failure after implementation of the stabilization measures. A list of structures subject to early and deferred dismantling is provided. Shelter safety criteria and radiation protection objectives are considered.

This paper studies the problem of safety-critical model reference adaptive control for switched uncertain nonlinear systems. The considered switched reference model whose subsystem possesses safe system behavior is governed by a switching signal to obtain satisfactory performances. In order to weaken the influence of uncertainties, a switching adaptive controller is designed, which does not involve the magnitude and the rate upper bounds of uncertainties. Resorting to the projection operator, different update laws are provided for different subsystems avoiding the conservatism that different subsystems share a common update law. Based on the common Lyapunov function method, a condition is proposed to guarantee the safety of switched systems under arbitrary switching and the boundedness of the state errors between the switched system and the switched reference model.

This paper presents a high-speed bearingless cross-flow fan particularly suited for applications in chemically demanding environments. In general, bearingless motors convince with a friction-and wear-free operation, unlimited lifetime and a hermetically-sealed encapsulation of the rotor. For the proposed cross-flow fan, a double-sided use of such motors additionally leads to twice the available torque for the blade rotation as well as a highly compact and safe system design. In sophisticated applications (e.g. gas-circulation systems of excimer laser) those arguments are crucial. After a description of the motor topolopy, the novel bearingless cross-flow fan prototype is introduced. To characterize its performance, measurements are performed on a ISO 5801 based test rig.

Measurement and monitoring systems (MMSs) are intrinsically part of 4.0 and, in particular, of cyber-physical systems (CPSs). However, by introducing the 4.0 enabling technologies into MMSs, also the vice versa can be accomplished, and MMSs can evolve into a cyber-physical measurement system (CPMS). Starting from this consideration, in the present work, a preliminary case study of a CPMS is presented: an innovative robotic platform to be used for measurement systems in confined and constrained remote environments. The proposed system is a soft growing robot that includes a robot base, to be placed outside the remote environments, and a robot body that accesses the site through growth. A pneumatic actuation mechanism enables the controllable growth of the system (through lengthening at its tip), as well as its controllable steering. The system can be equipped with sensors to enable remote monitoring tasks, or can be used to transport sensors in remote locations. The ultimate goal is to achieve a self-adapting, fully-autonomous, reliable and safe system for monitoring applications, particularly useful for the remote inspection of unknown and/or constrained environments.

In this paper we discuss how to use a barrier function that is subject to kinematic constraints and limited sensing in order to guarantee that fixed wing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) will maintain safe distances from each other at all times despite being subject to limited range sensing constraints. Prior work has shown that a barrier function can be used to guarantee safe system operation when the state can be sensed at all times. However, in this paper we show that this construction does not guarantee safety when the UAVs are subject to limited range sensing. To resolve this issue, we introduce a method for constructing a new barrier function that accommodates limited sensing range from a previously existing barrier function that may not necessarily accommodate limited range sensing. We show that, under appropriate conditions, the newly constructed barrier function ensures system safety even in the presence of limited range sensing. We demonstrate the contribution of this paper in a scenario of 20 fixed wing aircraft, where because of the proposed algorithm, the vehicles are able to maintain safe distances from each other even though the vehicles are subject to limited range sensing., \c{opyright} 2021 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes,creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works

Objective To assess the impact of shipment and storage of sperm, oocytes, and blastocysts in vapor phase nitrogen compared with static storage in liquid phase nitrogen. Design Prospective cohort-matched study. Setting Multiple in vitro fertilization laboratories in an in vitro fertilization network. Patient(s) Fifty-eight human embryos, 32 human oocytes, 15 units of bovine semen. Intervention(s) Vapor vs. liquid nitrogen. Main Outcome Measure(s) The postwarming survival of oocytes, sperm, and blastocysts, and the developmental potential of blastocysts during in vitro extended culture. Result(s) Custom-designed labware, for use with the TMRW platform, enables continuous temperature monitoring during shipment and/or storage in the vapor phase robotic storage system. The highest temperature recorded for specimens shipped to a domestic laboratory was −180.2 °C with a mean ± SD of −190.4 ± 0.5 °C during shipment and −181.1 ± 0.6 °C during storage. Likewise, specimens shipped internationally had a high of −180.2 °C with a mean ± SD of −193.5 ± 0.6 °C during shipment and −181.2 ± 0.7 °C during storage. Results from the extended culture assays have revealed no deleterious effect of shipment and storage in nitrogen vapor. The viability of mammalian gametes and embryos was equivalent between the vapor phase and liquid phase storage. Conclusion(s) The evaluated system did not have any deleterious effects on the postwarming survival of sperm, oocytes, and blastocysts. The postwarming developmental potential of human blastocysts during in vitro extended culture was unaffected by storage and handling in the vapor phase nitrogen TMRW platform when compared with static liquid phase nitrogen storage. Our results suggest that the vapor phase cryostorage platform is a safe system to handle and store reproductive specimens for human assisted reproductive technology.

COVID-19 and motor vehicle crashes (MVC) are both considered epidemics by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the World Health Organization (WHO), yet their progression, treatment and success in treatment have been very different. In this paper, we propose that the well-established sustainable safety approach to road safety can be applied to the management of COVID-19. We compare COVID-19 and MVC in terms of several defining characteristics, including evolvement and history, definitions and measures of evaluation, main attributes and characteristics, countermeasures, management and coping strategies, and key success factors. Despite stark differences, there are also some similarities between the two epidemics, and these enable insights into how the principles of sustainable road safety can be utilized to cope with and guide the treatment of COVID-19. Major guidelines that can be adopted include an aggressive policy set at the highest national level. The policy should be data- and science-based and would be most effective when relying on a systems approach (such as Sweden’s Vision Zero, the Netherlands’ Sustainable Safety, and the recommended EU Safe System). The policy should be enforceable and supplemented with positive public information and education campaigns (rather than scare tactics). Progression of mortality and morbidity should be tracked continuously to enable adjustments. Ethical issues (such as invasion of privacy) should be addressed to maximize public acceptance. Interestingly, the well-established domain of MVC can also benefit from the knowledge, experience, and strategies used in addressing COVID-19 by raising the urgency of detection and recognition of new risk factors (e.g., cell phone distractions), developing and implementing appropriate policy and countermeasures, and emphasizing the saliency of the impact of MVC on our daily lives.

Context The Safe System, an internationally recognised philosophy for planning, design and operation of a transport system forms the basis of the Vision Zero movement. Safe System Assessments (SSAs) are a process for quantifying transport projects’ alignment with Safe System principles. Austroads documented the process in AP-R509–16 SSA Framework. Process When applied to infrastructure SSAs score existing and proposed infrastructure on alignment with Safe System principles. Scores are based on key crash types and risk so that full Safe System would achieve a score of zero. After scoring, recommendations are provided to further reduce the score. Analysis In Victoria, 327 SSAs have been completed on projects including road upgrades, road duplications, route upgrade projects and new town bypasses. Taking one example, the SSA process was used to analyse a freeway upgrade. Outcomes Analysis of the widening of the Tullamarine Freeway (Melbourne) indicates that for run-off-road crashes the Safe System score before the widening was 30, the original widening design was 24, but a formal SSA reduced the score to 16. Learning Outcomes Reviewing the first 50 SSAs in different road environments identified common issues of planning and road design that have less than desirable alignment with Safe System principles. These include unprotected roadside areas of interest, intersections with high potential kinetic energy crashes, mixing of high-speed traffic with vulnerable road users and designs that cause maintenance and/or emergency vehicle access difficult and dangerous.

A consensus is building around the value of systemic approaches to collision prevention. In Latin America, cities are beginning to take heed. Gary Humphreys reports.

Safe vehicle speeds were identified as a key element in a safe system approach to road safety. The City of Yarra in Melbourne, Australia has a 40 km/h default speed limit across their municipality, but wished to reduce the speed limit in local residential streets to 30 km/h. The Monash University Accident Research Center provided Council with a design for a demonstration trial and agreed to evaluate its safety benefits over 12 months. The trial was expected to show significant reductions in speed and increased community support. A before and after design was employed with a control (untreated) area to evaluate the safety outcomes of the trial. Speed limits were reduced to 30 km/h in the trial area for 12 months but kept at kept at the current 40 km/h (25 mph) limit in the control region. Vehicle speeds were measured at around 100 selected sites in the trial and control areas, and resident surveys were undertaken in both regions before and after the trial. The findings showed a small but modest reduction of 1.1% in average speed in the trial region but a surprising 2.7% in the control region. On further examination, significant reductions were observed in the percent of vehicles exceeding 40 km/h (25 mph) and 50 km/h (31 mph) in both the treated and control regions, but not at 30 km/h (19 mph). A regression analysis further showed a significant treatment effect of 11% at 40 km/h and 25% at 50 km/h when adjusting for differences between treated and controls. Among other findings, the survey results found increased support for the lower speed limit of 17% with little adverse consequences. The findings give support for the likely safety benefits of the 30 km/h trial with increased support from the residents. Speed reductions in the control region suggested a carry-over of the effects of the trial but also added support by local residents for reduced speed limits in the region. Potential injury savings were estimated at a 4% reduction in the risk of a pedestrian injury from the observed treatment effect in the trial region.

The objective of Sustainable Safety is to prevent road crashes from happening, and where this is not possible, to reduce the severity of injuries as much as possible. This can be achieved by a proactive approach in which human characteristics are used as the starting point: a user-centric system approach. These characteristics refer on the one hand to human physical vulnerability, and on the other hand to human (cognitive) capacities and limitations. People regularly make errors unintentionally and are not always able to perform their tasks as they should. This brings us to the question whether a Safe System approach is a bridge too far for India or could it be a source of inspiration. I believe that a Safe System could also be of importance for India. Not, of course, in the sense that the measures, as they have been implemented in the Netherlands and in Sweden, could be copied on a one-to-one basis for the Indian situation; the countries differ too much. Nor can the Sustainable Safety principles be applied in India without any adaptations. The challenge will then be to translate these principles to the Indian (road traffic) conditions and society.

After the inquest into five deaths, the assistant coroner for Cambridgeshire and Peterborough concluded that NHS treatment for patients with anorexia is “not a safe system” and risks “future deaths.”1 These statements echo those of the Parliamentary Health Service Ombudsman (PHSO) which published a report titled Ignoring the alarms: how NHS eating disorder services are failing patients in 2017.2 As I’m …

Stateful priorities are used for imposing precise restrictions on system actions, in order to meet safety constraints. Those priorities restrict erroneous system behavior, whereas safe system behavior remains unrestricted. In this work, we present the design of the tool CrEStO, which obtains those priorities, and we extend its query support. We also present several examples, experiments and point out future research work.

In this study, an agent-based model is developed to examine the impact of long-term bilateral contracts on the performance of energy-only markets and markets with capacity remuneration mechanism (CRMs). Specific emphasis is put on hedging via bilateral forward contracts. We found that bilateral contracts can indeed incentivize investments in new capacities and help to reach a relatively safe system margin, but at an increase in total system costs. Implementing CRMs, in the presence of bilateral contracts, lead to a higher and more stable system margin while maintaining the total system cost on a similar level. ispartof: International Conference on European Electricity Market, EEM ispartof: 2020 17th International Conference on the European Energy Market (EEM) location:Stockholm, Sweden date:16 Sep - 18 Sep 2020 status: Published online

We present the notion of stateful priorities for imposing precise restrictions on system actions, in order to meet safety constraints. By using stateful priorities we are able to exclusively restrict erroneous system behavior as specified by the constraint, whereas safe system behavior remains unrestricted. Given a system modeled as a network of discrete automata and an error constraint, we present algorithms which use those inputs to synthesize stateful priorities. We present as well a network transformation which uses synthesized priorities for blocking all system actions leading to the input error. The applicability of our approach is demonstrated on three real-world examples.

International audience; This article considers injuries related to crushing and methods of prevention and minimisation of such injuries, particularly from the perspective of plant operations, where a crush injury occurs when the body or a body part is trapped, pinched or jammed under or between objects (Victoria State Government., 2020). A safe system of work, underpinned by worker awareness, should be implemented and maintained in all load shifting operations in order to minimise or prevent crush injury risks. Employers and workers should participate in inductions, safety meetings and consultation activities to ensure that they are aware of best practices to control crush hazards.

Road transport is failing pedestrians more than other road users. For pedestrians, roads are not safe or improving: Globally pedestrian deaths have increased at nearly twice the rate of other road crash deaths (12.9% increase from 2013 to 2016, vs. a 6.6% increase for other road users). Pedestrians commonly lack safe crossings, safe speeds, and in many locations, footpaths. This paper briefly identifies successes and failures for pedestrian safety, reviews weaknesses, and limitations to actions for pedestrian safety, and identifies barriers to effective action. Barriers include current culture on road usage, victim blaming, under-estimation of the pedestrian crash death problem in particular, and other crash data issues. Advocacy, policies, and actions are recommended to overcome these barriers and to improve pedestrian safety.

Setting safe speed limit is very critical and complex phenomenon, which has to be decided based on the road hierarchy that categorizes roads according to their functions and capacities, and poses certain restrictions in the design process. However, this is challenging in urban regions of developing countries, where rapid city growth forces high-speed intercity roads to serve as urban arterials, along which traditional 50 km/h limit is not practically possible. To lower the speed variation (and provide mobility), speed limit increase is allowed as high as 82 km/h as in the case of urban arterials in Turkey. To understand the real impact of such controversial countermeasures, which is the main scope of this study, spatiotemporal distribution of accident hotspots along urban arterials are analyzed in GIS using nearest neighbor hierarchical (NNH) clustering; changes between 3 years before and after periods are evaluated using as hit rate (HR), predictive accuracy index (PAI), and recapture rate index (RRI) indices. For a case study of 7 urban arterials in Ankara, NNH analysis (with nmin = 5 and dmax = 250 m) resulted in 94 clusters in the before period, while there were 101 clusters in the after period; and decreased PAI values in the after case showed more accidents in the clusters, demonstrated no real improvement by speed limit increase. Application of safe system approach in the critical hotspots also showed that speed limit increase on the study corridors in Ankara was against the safe limits suggested by UNECE based on possibility of certain accident types.

Many jurisdictions globally have adopted a zero road trauma target by 2050 and an interim target of a 50% reduction by 2030. The objective of this study was to investigate what the road system will need to look like in order to achieve these respective targets. Utilising human tolerance to injury as the key design factor, this study defined the combination of vehicle, infrastructure, and travel speed requirements to manage crash energy in order to: 1. prevent all fatalities and serious injuries by 2050 in an Ultimate Safe System scenario; and 2. significantly reduce fatalities and severe injuries by 2030 in an Interim Safe System scenario. Victoria, Australia and its Movement and Place (M&P) framework was employed as a case study. With the vehicle and infrastructure countermeasures currently available coupled with appropriate travel speeds it is possible to construct an Ultimate Safe System that can manage crash forces to achieve zero trauma and an Interim Safe System that can significantly reduce the most severe injuries in Victoria. This study has demonstrated a potential pathway from the current situation to 2030 and then 2050 that can achieve safety targets while meeting the core objectives of the transport system.

The Safe System approach to road safety has been adopted in many countries, but it has been adopted pervasively to a substantially constrained extent. This paper argues that effective adoption is hampered by two weaknesses in strategies for the implementation of Safe System: (1) interpretations of the shared responsibility principle and (2) Safe System adoption presented as simply requiring the use of multiple pillars of action. The typical description of shared responsibility includes responsibility by road users to obey the rules. This absolves accountability for road safety by the system owners and operators, facilitating victim blaming and reliance on road users who are acknowledged to be fallible. Thus, the system cannot be fully safe, and the vision of zero road trauma cannot be achieved. The extent to which road users are responsible for road safety via their actions is precisely the extent to which those responsible for the system have failed to deliver a safe road system. The assessment of road safety plans as Safe System because it includes multiple pillars of action fails to distinguish a system approach from a Safe System approach. Through these inclusions and interpretations, road safety advocates inadvertently obviate the responsibility of system owners and operators to provide a safe road system and prevent the achievement of zero road trauma, which nonetheless remains the vision described in Safe System strategies and plans. The Ultimate Safe System approach is proposed with a definition that genuinely drives the delivery of a truly Safe System and thus zero road trauma. Practical implications are considered.

Recent serious untoward incidents in the field of assisted reproduction have once again highlighted the need for vigilance and in particular improved risk management in relation to the cryopreservation of gametes and embryos. Despite increasing levels of regulation and the requirement to adhere to total quality management practices, catastrophic incidents such as the death of an employee or the loss of a freezer full of patient embryos or sperm continue to occur sufficiently frequently for the industry to be concerned and highlight the need to make practices considerably safer. Potential losses through litigation could be considerable if the gamete or embryo bank is found to be negligent and fails to provide the necessary resources and implement recognizable control measures, which may include suitable facilities with adequate ventilation and oxygen monitoring, competent staff, and an appropriate level of well-maintained equipment; round-the-clock emergency procedures, early warning systems to deal with a failing vessel; and contingency to mitigate losses within a failing vessel and validated procedures which are embedded into the organization which lead to a high-quality end product, for example, frozen embryo while permitting a safe system of work. Since cross-contamination incidents have occurred in other disciplines such as blood cryostorage, which have led to the transmission of viral disease, the biological safety of the end product also requires careful consideration despite the fact that no similar incident appears to have come to light in the field of reproductive medicine. Implementation of risk reduction measures may include screening for blood borne viruses and possibly bacterial infection, careful selection of appropriate packaging plastics, and consideration as to whether packaging is suitable for immersion in liquid nitrogen. If not, vapor phase storage may be considered as additional mitigation. In the light of recent events, centers should place risk management of their cryofacilities and service high on the agenda and ensure that it becomes integral to future objective setting and business planning.