Model Based Systems Engineering: Fundamentals and Methods

10

Safety Engineering

10.1. Introduction

Most states¹ impose that a level of protection should be provided by civil aviation to each citizen through the adoption of safety rules, and by measures that ensure that products, people and organizations respect these rules. This is the reason why aeronautical products² are subject to certification to guarantee that they comply with the essential airworthiness requirements related to civil aviation, airworthiness being the aptitude of a civil aircraft to safely carry out its mission: transporting people.

In this chapter, we will discuss safety engineering carried out during the different phases of the development of a type of systems. We recall the signification of the term “safety” given by the ED79A/ARP4754A at page 9: safety is a state in which the risk is acceptable, whereas the term “risk” (p. 9) corresponds to the probability of occurrence of an event associated with its severity.

First, we recall what the ARP4754A says of the safety assessment process, the goal that this recommendation sets and the means that it advocates. We will then see how these goals and means can be declined within the framework of the systems engineering approach based on the models we propose, namely the property-model method.

10.2. The safety assessment process according to the ARP4754A

10.2.1. Goal of safety assessment process

Strictly speaking, the ARP 4754A recommendation defines the safety assessment as the process which, carried out jointly with other ...