Towards a model-based evolutionary chain of evidence for compliance with safety standards

Compliance with safety standards can greatly increase the development cost and time of critical systems. Major problems arise when evolutions to a system entail reconstruction of the body of safety evidence. When changes occur in the development or certification processes, identification of the new evidence to provide, the evidence that is no longer adequate, or the evidence that can be reused poses some challenges. Therefore, practitioners need support to identify how a chain of evidence evolves as a result of the changes. Otherwise, execution of the above activities can be very costly, and it can even result in abandonment of certification efforts. This paper outlines a solution to deal with these challenges. The solution is based on the use of model-driven engineering technology, which has already been applied for safety certification but not from an evolutionary chain of evidence-based perspective. The paper also sets the background for developing the solution, describes real situations in which the solution can help industry, and discusses possible challenges for developing it. The solution will be developed as part of OPENCOSS, a research project on cross-domain evolutionary certification.