On traceability for safety critical systems engineering

Traceability is the common term for mechanisms to record and navigate relationships between artifacts produced by systems development processes. It is especially vital for critical systems which must satisfy a range of functional and non-functional requirements, including safety, reliability and availability. Regulation normally requires critical systems are certified before entering service. This involves submission of a safety case - a reasoned argument and supporting evidence that such requirements have been met and that the system is acceptably safe. Safety engineers use a range of analysis techniques to gather evidence for a safety case. Most have tool support, although poor integration limits traceability between their respective data sets. This paper proposes a framework that enables links to be established and consistency maintained across data from disjoint safety analysis tools.