life critical information

Question

Could someone please explain to me what we refer to as life critical information and to what we refer to as mission critical information. I was searching the internet for hours but I could not find an exact definition, or at least examples of what this refers to.

Answer 1

I've not heard the term "life critical" before, but mission critical information implies that, without this information, the "mission" would fail. For example, if you have some type of weapon that requires a special code sequence to activate, the code would be critical to the mission of discharging the weapon.

Does that help?

Answer 2

By extension, life critical is probably information required to keep a project going :)

Answer 3

The term life-critical is applied to systems that, if they fail, will lead to death of individuals or loss of equipment. Examples of life-critical systems are radiation therapy machines (see Therac-25 for an example of where things went wrong), nuclear reactor control systems, air traffic control systems, and spaceflight vehicles.

Mission-critical systems are those that are essential to a task, but if they fail, will only lead to the task being incomplete - there is no danger of injury or death. Examples of mission-critical systems vary by domain, but an example might be a stock trading system for a stock broker or a reservation system for an airline.

The information that you are referring to is the information consumed and/or produced by these systems. I don't have any experience in mission or life critical systems, so I can't elaborate on the kinds of information that they consume or output, but if you research them, I'm sure you could learn about the design and implementation of systems of that nature.

Answer 4

Life Critical

A life-critical system or safety-critical system is a system whose failure or malfunction may result in:

• death or serious injury to people, or
• loss or severe damage to equipment or
• environmental harm.

and

Mission Critical

The term mission critical (or mission-critical) refers to any factor (equipment, process, procedure, software, etc.) which is crucial to the successful completion of an entire project.

Answer 5

I've heard the term before while working on a medical information project. I remember allergies being a life critical piece of information. Give someone a medication they are alergic to and you could kill them.

Answer 6

Wikipedia has a nice definition.

Take a pacemaker. Life critical information is the current heart rate. If this information is wrong or isn't delivered in a timely manner, a real human life is in immediate danger.

In a similar way, the current stress of an axis in a generator is "life critical" for said machine. Or when the auto-pilot of an oil tanker guesses that "this gap between those two boats is wide enough".

Mission critical is something that can make a project fail but won't necessarily kill people or equipment.

Usually, mission critical things can be fixed even when they fail the first time. This is much less likely for life critical.