Investigation on Safety-Related Standards for Critical Systems

In each application domain for safety-critical systems, international organizations have issued regulations concerned with the development, implementation, validation and maintenance of safety-critical systems. In particular, each of them indicate a definition of what safety means, proper qualitative and quantitative properties for evaluating the quality of the system under development, and a set of methodologies to be used for assessing the fulfilment of the mentioned properties. These standards are today and essential tool for ensuring the required safety levels in many domains that require extremely high dependability. This paper summarizes the analysis on a set of well-known safety standards in different domains of critical systems with the intend of highlighting similarities and differences among them, pointing out common areas of interest and reporting on which features the newest (and upcoming) standards are focusing.