2. Fundamental concepts and general principles of safe design

2.1 From hazardous entity to accident: a normative approach to the accident process

For the design engineer, designing a safe machine means applying principles and measures, mainly of a technical nature, to guarantee the non-occurrence of so-called catastrophic failures, i.e. those whose consequences would be harmful to human health (whether the operator or a third party).

To meet this objective, the normative approach invites the designer to consider the process by which damage occurs, based on an admittedly simplistic model.

It is initially the conjunction of two states - the presence of a hazardous entity (EN ISO 12100-1) (the "machine" technical object) on the one hand, and the presence of Man (generally the operator, but in some...