Compliance and Rigour in Process Assessment for Safety-Critical Domain

Abstract

Safety-critical systems are increasingly affecting our lives and welfare. New approaches are being developed to evaluate the abilities related to development of these systems. Process assessment can be applied to increase our trust in safety related systems development. Importance of meeting the requirements of existing safety standards and regulations has increased, but also the quality of the process assessments needs to be ensured. Important features include assessment rigour, and compliance to standards and regulatory requirements. In this paper we discuss the challenges in process assessment with highest safety-criticality and present an approach to manage the assessments by a classification of relevant assessment types. The outcome is evaluated with a domain specific example. We conclude that process assessment has significant limitations in its capability to verify safety requirements, and especially regulatory requirements. On the other hand, process assessments are applicable to certain purposes, like supplier selection, and they can be developed to include a wider coverage of evidence important to the safety-critical domain. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2014.