Software Safety Standards for the Basis of Certification in the Nuclear Domain

In the nuclear domain, regulators have strict requirements for safety-critical software. As a part of Finnish nuclear research program SAFIR2010 an on-going project called CERFAS aims to define necessary software certification services for nuclear industry needs. Main areas of the service development activities are process assessment and product evaluation. Several additional modules and methods are needed and will be developed during the project. The certification service is closely based on software safety standards. The nuclear domain software standard IEC 60880 provides requirements for the purpose of achieving highly reliable software. The standard is similar to the part 3 of IEC 61508 standard in the sense that it covers requirements for all software life-cycle activities. In this paper, we introduce Software Certification Service, SCS, and compare the two software safety standards to each other in terms to find out whether one of these standards or both of them may provide basis for software certification in the nuclear domain.