2010
Supporting Explicit Interpretation of Standards and Guidance
Presented at IET Conference on System Safety, Manchester, UK, October 2010
The standards and guidance used in safety-critical systems
development are subject to varying degrees of interpretation.
This is most apparent when the guidance from one document
is used as a means of compliance for another. One such
example is Def Stan 00-56; it sets a number of relatively
abstract goals and encourages the use of other standards to
meet those goals. In this paper, we present a modelling
technique that helps the system developer to explain how the
use of one standard meets the needs of another by way of
explicit items of evidence. We illustrate the model with some
examples from recent work on Def Stan 00-56 and IEC
61508, and discuss some of the critical issues in enabling
more general use of such explicit representations.