Safety Engineering with COTS components

Safety-critical systems are becoming more widespread, complex and reliant on software. Increasingly they are engineered through Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS) (Commercial Off The Shelf) components to alleviate the spiralling costs and development time, often in the context of complex supply chains. A parallel increased concern for safety has resulted in a variety of safety standards, with a growing consensus that a safety life cycle is needed which is fully integrated with the design and development life cycle, to ensure that safety has appropriate influence on the design decisions as system development progresses. In this article we explore the application of an integrated approach to safety engineering in which assurance drives the engineering process. The paper re- ports on the outcome of a case study on a live industrial project with a view to evaluate: its suitability for application in a real-world safety engineering setting; its benefits and limitations in counteracting some of the difficulties of safety en- gineering with COTS components across supply chains; and, its effectiveness in generating evidence which can contribute directly to the construction of safety cases

Security-informed safety: integrating security within the safety demonstration of a smart device

Safety and security engineering have, over the years, developed their own regulations, standards, cultures, and practices. However, there’s a growing realisation that security is closely connected to safety. Safety must be security-informed: if a safety-critical system isn’t secure, it isn’t safe. A safety demonstration is incomplete and unconvincing unless it considers security. In our work for government and industry, we have used the Claims, Arguments, Evidence (CAE) framework to analyse the impact of security on a safety justification or safety case and identified the significant changes needed to address security explicitly. This will impact the design and implementation process as well as the assurance and V&V approach. In this paper we discuss the impact of integrating security when developing a safety demonstration of a smart device. A smart device is an instrument, device or component that contains a microprocessor (and therefore contains both hardware and software) and is programmed to provide specialised capabilities, often measuring or controlling a process variable. Examples of smart devices include radiation monitors, relays, turbine governors, uninterruptible power supplies and heating ventilation, and air conditioning controllers

Provision and Collection of Safety Evidence: A Systematic Literature Review

Safety-Critical Systems (SCS) are becoming more and more present in modern societies’ daily lives, increasing people’s dependence on them. Current SCS are firmly based on computational technology; possible failures in the operation of these systems can lead to accidents and endanger human life, as well as damage the environment and property. SCS are present in many areas such as avionics, automotive systems, industrial plants (chemical, oil & gas, and nuclear), medical devices, railroad control, defense, and aerospace systems. Companies that develop SCS must present evidence of their safety to obtain certification and authorization. This paper presents a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) to investigate processes, tools, and techniques for collecting and managing safety evidence in SCS. The authors conducted this SLR according to the guidelines proposed by Kitchenham and Charters. The SLR comprises seven (7) research questions that investigate essential aspects of collecting and managing safety evidence. The primary studies analyzed in this SLR were selected based on a search string applied into four data sources: ACM, IEEE Xplore, SpringerLink, and ScienceDirect. Data extraction considered (fifty-one) 51 primary studies. The authors identified eleven (11) different approaches covering processes, tools, and techniques for collecting and managing safety evidence. Despite other SLR works conducted about safety evidence, none of them focused on the details related to safety evidence collection. We found that very few approaches focused specifically on the process of collecting safety evidence

Developing a distributed electronic health-record store for India

The DIGHT project is addressing the problem of building a scalable and highly available information store for the Electronic Health Records (EHRs) of the over one billion citizens of India

Nuclear Energy in the UK: Safety Culture and Industrial Organisation

In this paper we seek to explore the relationship between professionalism and nuclear safety in the UK. We consider the history of civil nuclear energy in Britain and the near complete shift in emphasis from state owned enterprises to the private sector. We show how in recent years government has acknowledged that a truly liberalised electricity industry is unable to deliver the construction of new nuclear power stations as part of a future low carbon electricity system. Throughout, however, the intention has been for policy merely to incentivise the private sector rather than to steer industry strategy directly. Having said that, the line between strong incentives and weak control can be hard to see. We present illustrative examples, real and fictional, that give insight into the UK nuclear safety culture and we discuss the wider nature of UK society with respect to corruption. We conclude that the unique basis of safety regulation in the UK, essentially permissive rather than prescriptive, has a key role to play in promoting and maintaining nuclear professionalism

Transboundary supply chain risk management: A consolidation of transboundary and supply chain risk management

Supply chains are becoming increasingly vulnerable to disruptions and face greater exposure from the dynamics of global interconnectivity. The growing complexities of modern societies have prompted renewed focus towards supply chain risk management (SCRM) research over the last decade. However, research related to transboundary risk issues has yet to be given substantial attention in recent years. Contributing to the developments in the field of SCRM, this thesis proposes an approach for managing global supply chain risk which modifies current SCRM processes to account for the dynamic nature of transboundary risks. This work extends current literary contributions and aims to compensate for the lack of transboundary risk focus in SCRM. Introducing the taxonomy of transboundary supply chain risk management (TSCRM), the present paper conceptualises a holistic integrative framework that incorporates resilience principles to adaptively manage the transboundary risk environment of global supply chains. In line with this framework, additional templates, tables, and a TSCRM planning process are proposed to facilitate the navigation through the TSCRM process, in particular the risk identification, and risk response selection and implementation phases