IEE Professional Network

Safety Cases for PES

Safety cases are an important part of goal based safety regulation and corporate governance. We define a safety case as

"A documented body of evidence that provides a convincing and valid argument that a system is adequately safe for a given application in a given environment"

In these pages we provide some background to the use of safety cases, outline a generic approach to safety cases and discuss notations and tools. The approach described has been applied by ourselves and others to a wide variety of systems, some containing PES others not. An introduction is provided for readers not familiar with the problems that software can bring to assurance  and the issues of using SOUP/COTS are also discussed.

The pages are based on a number of papers that have been written by Adelard. Full versions of most of these are available for download. References to key papers are provided at the end of each section.

Robin Bloomfield (reb(at)adelard.com) and colleagues, August 2002.