Towards Making Safety-Critical Systems Safer: Learning from Mistakes

Safety-critical systems usually need to be qualified and certified, they follow specific and strict development standards that recommend the use of techniques and processes, specific personnel training and domain expertise. These systems are very sensitive to failures and thus there is a need to guarantee the higher quality and dependability levels. The goal of this paper is to present the PhD work plan that shall lead to a disruptive approach to identify the quality gaps, root-causes and improve safety-critical systems engineering. The main idea is to start from the classification of real issues, map them to engineering properties and root causes, and identify how to avoid and reduce the impact of those causes. The foreseen improvements shall be reflected in development and V&V techniques, resources training or preparation, and international standards adaptations in order to reflect measurable improvement in the safety and quality of the systems.