Primer on Engineering Standards

Chapter 3Voluntary Consensus Standards and Codes

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3.1 Purpose of Standards

Engineering standards are normally sets of rules, procedures, and/or requirements developed and approved by consensus to assure the adequacy of a given product, process, or system. Standards are normally developed in committees whose members have experience in a particular field of endeavor. Generally, standards are written for the following purposes:

1. Safety and reliability
2. Reduction of cost
3. Increased flexibility
4. Promotion of business
5. Helping society function
6. Consistency.

3.1.1 Standards for Safety and Reliability

Much has been learned about how to create effective standards for safety and reliability since the early efforts. Even the codes for protection from fire have evolved and expanded. Much of Baltimore burned in 1904 because fire crews sent from other cities to help found that their hoses could not be connected to the Baltimore fire hydrants. This lesson was learned again in 1991 in Oakland, California, when thousands of houses were burned, in part because fire departments from neighboring jurisdictions found themselves unable to connect with the hydrants in that city (Note that in neither of these two cases was this a failure of standards due to lack of conformity assessment. In each case the city had selected a product that happened not to be ...