The safety precautions are that you must make sure that there is no possibility of the generator or the mains being connected together. For high current cicuits when a single changeover relay cannot be used, say over 30A. Then a pair of contactors have to be used, only one at a time being selected. To overcome the unlikely problem of one of the contactors having its contacts welded together, i.e. when the other contactor is energised, the first one is still jammed in, the contactors are supplied as a mechanically interlocked pair, so it is physically impossible to have both selected at once. Also if the mains are being worked on so you are running on the generator you don't want to be feeding mains "backwards" down the mains wire to electrocute any of the workers. With automatic running you must have some sort of indication/alarms so the state of the oil, fuel, engine temperature... can be seen because you might be running on the generator so you check these out without breaking your supply (cos' the mains is off!!)
Frank