Over the past year, the Executive Committee has reviewed the scope and the direction of the Functional Safety Technical and Professional Network (TPN).  We want the network to stay relevant to the Safety community, by covering a wider remit and broadening our vision.


Safety has a key part to play in the IET technical structure and we want the TPN to have a key role. We decided to change our name to the System Safety Engineering TPN to reflect this.



 Why Change?

    We had concerns about what the Functional Safety TPN is about, what it is and where it is going.

    Pockets of good things were happening, but no cohesion or direction.

    We want a broader vision: not just Functional Safety, but wider systems engineering aspects.

    Professional registration is changing and we need to better support safety engineers.

A new name

We are changing the TPN name to ‘System Safety Engineering TPN’, with ‘functional safety’ as a subgroup, along with other interest areas.


System Safety is about applying systems engineering and systems management to the process of hazard, safety and risk analysis to identify, assess and control associated hazards while designing or modifying systems, products, or services.  The aim is to reduce or eliminate the potential for accidents before production, construction or operation takes place.


Overall, our focus is to help people develop safe systems and services by giving safety issues proper consideration as part of systems engineering.  Within this remit, our interests include:


    Functional safety – the part of safety that relates to the need for systems to perform their functions correctly.

    Human factors – the study of how humans form part of wider systems, and how the technological system, their environment and other factors can influence human performance.

    Systems of systems and dynamic management of safety – dealing with intended and unintended behaviour of complicated and complex systems and their interactions.

    Exploring the interactions between safety, cyber security, resilience and other allied disciplines.


Going forward

System safety engineering draws from a broad range of engineering, behavioural, scientific, legal and managerial skills.  In the future, we want to help prepare safety engineers to play a professional role in this world.  By looking ahead to how safety engineering will be in 5, 10 or 15 years, we want the System Safety Engineering TPN to identify technical challenges in the field.

Our remit is to

    provide high level technical support, as a volunteer part of the IET;

    generate relevant activity, be this physical or online;

    support what people take back to the professional life; and

    raise professional standards and understanding of safety.


We will now be promoted and listed as the IET System Safety Engineering Technical and Professional Network  - www.theiet.org/safety

Get Involved

If you want to get involved, please get in touch with Lynsay Callaghan (lcallaghan@theiet.org)