A Safety Condition Monitoring System

Abstract

In any safety argument, belief in the top-level goal depends upon a variety of assumptions that derive from the system development process, the operating context, and the system itself. If an assumption is false or becomes false at any point during the lifecycle, the rationale for belief in the safety goal might be invalidated and the safety of the associated system compromised. Assurance that assumptions actually hold when they are supposed to is not guaranteed, and so monitoring of assumptions might be required. In this paper, we describe the Safety Condition Monitoring System, a system that permits comprehensive yet flexible monitoring of assumptions throughout the entire lifecycle together with an alert infrastructure that allows tailored responses to violations of assumptions. An emphasis of the paper is the approach used to run-time monitoring of assumptions derived from software where the software cannot be easily changed.