Architecting and generalizing a safety case for critical condition detection software an experience report

Abstract

Safety cases and, specifically, software safety cases, have had virtually no presence in engineering practice in the US. Recent interest, in addition to an early attempt to introduce them into practice in the NASA Constellation Program, motivated us to develop a partial safety case for a safety critical subsystem for the Ares I vehicle, namely the abort detection, notification and response (AFDNR) system. This paper relates our experience applying the safety case concept to AFDNR, particularly from the perspective of generalizing the safety issues to similar fault management systems. We also provide lessons learned, including a discussion of issues that led to our current refactoring of our initial safety case.

Hazard analysis for human-on-the-loop interactions in sUAS systems

“…[18,20,23,24] in this area addresses different aspects of sUAS and UAV safety providing automation support and tools for creating and maintaining safety assurance cases. They emphasise reuse of safety assurance cases by proposing domain-independent and domain-specific patterns [21,28]. Other work has created reusable safety case patterns as building blocks for future product development [9,18,20,22,28,35].…”

“…They emphasise reuse of safety assurance cases by proposing domain-independent and domain-specific patterns [21,28]. Other work has created reusable safety case patterns as building blocks for future product development [9,18,20,22,28,35]. In the area of safety cases maintenance, Kelly and Weaver [39] presented a set of patterns and recommended the use of modularity to support safety cases evolution.…”