Introduction to Sassur 2012

Abstract

Safety assurance and certification are amongst the most expensive and time-consuming tasks in the development of safety-critical systems. The increasing complexity and size of these systems combined with their growing market demand requires the industry to implement a coherent reuse strategy. A key difficulty appears when trying to reuse products from one application domain in another, because different domains are subject to different safety regulations. Subsequently, for a reused product, the full safety assurance and certification process has to be applied, just as for a new product. This reduces the return on investment of such reuse. Further, market trends strongly suggest that many future safety-critical systems will be comprised of heterogeneous, dynamic coalitions of systems of systems. For this type of systems, it is crucial to develop sound strategies that would allow safety assurance and certification to be done compositionally.