Assessing Safety Critical COTS Systems

This paper gives a brief review of the problems of using Non-Developmental Items, NDI, (of which COTS products are a special case) in critical systems and approaches to dealing with them. The paper then concentrates on a particular technical approach which has been applied to a critical system comprising COTS, GOTS and legacy components from the point of view of demonstrating critical properties for certification Finally prospects for extending the approach to NDI in open architecture systems are considered.