Safety concept trees

The development of safety-critical systems requires the 'safe' development of a 'safe' system. Not only should the realized system fulfill specific safety goals, but for certification purposes the development process itself has to comply with safety standards. Both of these tasks are complex and cause a lot of effort and costs that cannot be sufficiently reduced by existing safety engineering methods. To facilitate these tasks, we developed the SICMA method. SICMA guides the engineer in following safety standards in the development of a system, in developing a system design that fulfills its safety goals and in documenting that the developed system is sufficiently safe. SICMA introduces Safety Concept Trees (SCTs) as a backbone to achieve vertical and horizontal traceability between all safety information, as needed for certification purposes. SCTs represent and fully preserve the component-oriented perspective assumed by state-of-the-art development methods, facilitating the handling and maintenance of complex systems. Using SCTs, a system design and its artifacts can be rigorously analyzed on every refinement level and it can be shown that they adhere to safety and certification criteria. This will lead to significantly reduced effort and costs in the standard-compliant development of safety-critical systems.