Issues and considerations for a modular safety certification approach in a Service-Oriented Architecture

Service Oriented Architecture is an architectural style that is being adopted by many of the major military organisations such as the United States Department of Defense, The North Alliance Treaty Organization and the UK´s Ministry of Defence, as a means to realise increased agility and reduced long term cost of ownership. SOA has emerged and matured predominately within the commercial sectors and as well as maturing further to overcome current challenges in these sectors, must address specific challenges when employed in a military context. This paper provides an introduction to the topic and identifies the issues and a potential methodology by which safety arguments can be constructed, based on experience from the military aviation domain. This is proposed as a means to support the flexible compositional characteristics of SOA whilst facilitating the Safety Certification and Accreditation of SOA-style systems and ´ systems of systems´.