[fastneutron]

This is a timely debate in engineering. Historically, it would be customary do the most conservative reliability analysis possible, right up to the point of accounting for physically impossible parameter combinations, just to ensure enough margin to trade at some point in the future when things inevitably don’t go as planned.

Now, technology has advanced to the point where all the low hanging fruit are gone in terms of performance optimization, and we’re better able to determine how close to the “cliff” we are, with tighter uncertainty bounds, than ever before with probabilistic design methods. By this logic, we should be able to squeeze out margin that was never needed (or never there) in the first place.

No safety professional would trade away margin you say, but the engineer is often between a rock and a hard place when a few percent traded away in margin translates to multiple millions of dollars in cost reduction or profit. Is it unethical to remove margin if your Bayesian UQ calculations are saying you’re still safe, if not safer than you were under the other methodology?

This tension is going to keep on building as AI-enabled solutions start penetrating more and more into traditional engineering fields, with as-yet unknown consequences.

[slt2021]

trading margin is perfectly fine if there are compensating mechanisms.

for example automatic circuit breakers and other sensors and actuators that can reliably respond to the critical conditions

if we can double the line current by trading margin, and only need to add few sensors and automatic breakers here and there - thats perfectly fine. You will double your current without building a new line basically