Safety is a concern in virtually all engineering processes
and systems. In engineering practices, there are many
principles and methods recommended for the engineer as
means to ensure safety. Even though these principles are of
paramount importance in the field, there is a lack of
general accounts of safety principles. The treatment in the
literature is normally piecemeal, often focusing only on a
specific field of engineering. In this article, we aim to
provide a general categorisation of safety principles. Based
on a list of 24 principles referred to in the literature of
safety engineering we will construct four general principles
in which they are categorised, representing different
approaches to safety engineering. In addition, we will
show how these principles can be understood against the
background of decision–theoretical distinctions that are
made in risk assessment and risk analysis. In Section 2 and
Appendix A, the 24 safety principles and the four
overarching principles are introduced. After a brief
presentation of risk assessment terminology in Section 3,
the different classes of safety principles are discussed in
some detail in Sections 4–6, and our general conclusions
are summarised in Section 7.