Glossary · Safety information
Safety-critical information
In safety documentation, safety-critical information is information whose absence, inaccuracy or delay can contribute to unsafe conditions or decisions. It includes warnings and instructions, but also values such as torque settings, stopping times, safety distances and lockout points.
- Technical documentation
- Compliance
In one sentence
Safety-critical information is any content whose absence, error or delay can lead to unsafe conditions, from warnings to parameter values.
Example
The stopping time of a robot cell used to calculate the position of a light curtain is safety-critical information: if the manual still shows the value from before a drive upgrade, the curtain may be mounted too close.
How it applies
- Technical documentation: Identify safety-critical content explicitly, for example with metadata or a dedicated information type, so that it receives stricter review, change control and translation checks than descriptive text.
- Machine safety: Numbers matter as much as warnings. A wrong stopping time or tightening torque can be more dangerous than a missing signal word.
- Evidence: Each safety-critical item should trace to its origin in the risk assessment, design data or test report, so that a change at the source triggers an update.
- AI and retrieval: Retrieval and generation systems must return safety-critical content verbatim and completely, from the approved version. Paraphrasing a limit value or dropping a condition is a safety defect.
Safety-critical information vs. information for use
Information for use is defined by its purpose: the information given to users. Safety-critical information is defined by its consequence if wrong, late or missing, and it can also sit in engineering records, service bulletins or the control software itself. Delays are part of the definition, which is why documentation latency matters.