Primer on Engineering Standards

Chapter 1Introduction

(Courtesy of XKCD, www.xkcd.com)

1.1 Background

Standards, including procedures, rules, codes, regulations, and jurisdictional requirements, play an important role in the engineering world. They furnish a means of ensuring consistent designs, quality, and operating characteristics, with adequate reliability, safe operation of components, and well-defined configurations. This book details their development, applications, limitations, and benefits to give the user, specifier, and standard writer a proper perspective of their importance, usefulness, and limitations, to promote their effective use and to improve the quality of future standards. While focusing on standards themselves, it also provides a brief introduction to the field of conformity assessment, by which compliance with standards is assured and verified.

This book does not attempt to address legal, commercial, or other nonengineering aspects of standards.

Rules, procedures, and standards can be developed by a single individual within or with authority over an organization or operation, by a subgroup of an organization, by the organization as a whole, or by other groups with a common interest.

The reader will find that common usage of terminology related to standards is inconsistent in the literature. Accordingly, the following definitions are provided and will be used in this book:

1. Rule: A single ...