Reuse of safety certification artefacts across standards and domains: A systematic approach

Reuse of systems and subsystem is a common practice in safety-critical systems engineering. Reuse can improve system development and assurance, and there are recommendations on reuse for some domains. Cross-domain reuse, in which a previously certified product typically needs to be assessed against different safety standards, has however received little attention. No guidance exists for this reuse scenario despite its relevance in industry, thus practitioners need new means to tackle it. This paper aims to fill this gap by presenting a systematic approach for reuse of safety certification artefacts across standards and domains. The approach is based on the analysis of the similarities and on the specification of maps between standards. These maps are used to determine the safety certification artefacts that can be reused from one domain to another and reuse consequences. The approach has been validated with practitioners in a case study on the reuse of an execution platform from railway to avionics. The results show that the approach can be effectively applied and that it can reduce the cost of safety certification across standards and domains. Therefore, the approach is a promising way of making cross-domain reuse more cost-effective in industry.European Commission's FP7 programm

Investigation on Safety-Related Standards for Critical Systems

In each application domain for safety-critical systems, international organizations have issued regulations concerned with the development, implementation, validation and maintenance of safety-critical systems. In particular, each of them indicate a definition of what safety means, proper qualitative and quantitative properties for evaluating the quality of the system under development, and a set of methodologies to be used for assessing the fulfilment of the mentioned properties. These standards are today and essential tool for ensuring the required safety levels in many domains that require extremely high dependability. This paper summarizes the analysis on a set of well-known safety standards in different domains of critical systems with the intend of highlighting similarities and differences among them, pointing out common areas of interest and reporting on which features the newest (and upcoming) standards are focusing