An extended systematic literature review on provision of evidence for safety certification <s> INTRODUCTION <s> This article is a programmatic article, which formulates a new approach to information science (IS): domain-analysis. This approach states that the most fruitful horizon for IS is to study the knowledge-domains as thought or discourse communities, which are parts of society's division of labor. The article is also a review article, providing a multidisciplinary description of research, illuminating this theoretical view. The first section presents contemporary research in IS, sharing the fundamental viewpoint that IS should be seen as a social rather than as a purely mental discipline. In addition, important predecessors to this view are mentioned and the possibilities as well as the limitations of their approaches are discussed. The second section describes recent transdisciplinary tendencies in the understanding of knowledge. In bordering disciplines to IS, such as educational research, psychology, linguistics, and the philosophy of science, an important new view of knowledge is appearing in the 1990s. This new view of knowledge stresses the social, ecological, and content-oriented nature of knowledge. This is opposed to the more formal, computer-like approaches that dominated in the 1980s. The third section compares domain-analysis to other major approaches in IS, such as the cognitive approach. The final section outlines important problems to be investigated, such as how different knowledge-domains affect the informational value of different subject access points in data bases. © 1995 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. <s> BIB001 </s> An extended systematic literature review on provision of evidence for safety certification <s> INTRODUCTION <s> Multidomain software-intensive system certification is a growing concern in international standards organizations. Certification is traditionally based on domain-specific technical and operational requirements, historical information about the reliability of the different subsystems, and historical accident data, but these may not be available for interdomain systems. There is a need for international and interdisciplinary legal recognition of certification authorities. The author explores both the legal and technical aspects of this critical, timely problem. <s> BIB002 </s> An extended systematic literature review on provision of evidence for safety certification <s> INTRODUCTION <s> This paper presents an overview and discusses the role of certification in safety-critical computer systems focusing on software, and partially hardware, used in the civil aviation domain. It discusses certification activities according to RTCA DO-178B “Software Considerations in Airborne Systems and Equipment Certification” and touches on tool qualification according to RTCA DO-254 “Design Assurance Guidance for Airborne Electronic Hardware.” Specifically, certification issues as related to real-time operating systems and programming languages are reviewed, as well as software development tools and complex electronic hardware tool qualification processes are discussed. Results of an independent industry survey done by the authors are also presented. <s> BIB003 </s> An extended systematic literature review on provision of evidence for safety certification <s> INTRODUCTION <s> Safety-critical systems, by definition those systems whose failure can cause catastrophic results for people, the environment, and the economy, are becoming increasingly complex both in their functionality and their interactions with the environment. Unfortunately, safety assessments are still largely done manually, a time-consuming and error-prone process. The growing complexity of these systems requires an increase in the skill and efficacy of safety engineers and encourages the adoption of formal and standardized techniques. An introduction to the area of design and verification of safety-critical systems, Design and Safety Assessment of Critical Systems focuses on safety assessment using formal methods. Beginning with an introduction to the fundamental concepts of safety and reliability, it illustrates the pivotal issues of design, development, and safety assessment of critical systems. The core of the book covers traditional notations, techniques, and procedures, including Fault Tree Analysis, FMECA, HAZOP, and Event Tree Analysis, and explains in detail how formal methods can be used to realize such procedures. It looks at the development process of safety-critical systems, and highlights influential management and organizational aspects. Finally, it describes verification and validation techniques and new trends in formal methods for safety and concludes with some widely adopted standards for the certification of safety-critical systems. Providing an in-depth and hands-on view of the application of formal techniques to advanced and critical safety assessments in a variety of industrial sectors, such as transportation, avionics and aerospace, and nuclear power, Design and Safety Assessment of Critical Systems allows anyone with a basic background in mathematics or computer science to move confidently into this advanced arena of safety assessment. <s> BIB004 </s> An extended systematic literature review on provision of evidence for safety certification <s> INTRODUCTION <s> Safety assurance and certification are amongst the most expensive and time-consuming tasks in the development of safety-critical systems. Demonstration of compliance with safety standards involves providing evidence that the standards' safety criteria are met. To handle large collections of evidence effectively, safety professionals need knowledge of how to classify different types of evidence, how to structure the evidence, and how to assess it. This paper takes a step towards developing such a body of knowledge by conducting a Systematic Literature Review (SLR). Specifically, the SLR identifies and classifies the information and artefacts considered as evidence for safety, examines existing techniques for evidence structuring and assessment, and summarizes the challenges noted in the literature in relation to safety evidence. The paper, to our knowledge, is the first systematic review on the topic of safety evidence. The results we present are particularly relevant to practitioners seeking to better understand the evidence requirements for safety certification, as well as to researchers conducting research in this area. <s> BIB005 </s> An extended systematic literature review on provision of evidence for safety certification <s> INTRODUCTION <s> Thank you for reading software for dependable systems sufficient evidence. Maybe you have knowledge that, people have search numerous times for their chosen novels like this software for dependable systems sufficient evidence, but end up in infectious downloads. Rather than enjoying a good book with a cup of coffee in the afternoon, instead they juggled with some malicious bugs inside their desktop computer. <s> BIB006
A safety-critical system is one whose failure may cause death or injury to people, harm to the environment, or substantial economic loss BIB004 . In domains such as aviation, railway, and automotive, such systems are typically subject to a rigorous safety assessment process. A common type of assessment, usually conducted by a licensing or regulatory body, is safety certification. The goal of safety certification is to provide a formal assurance that a system will function safely in the presence of known hazards BIB003 . Safety certification can be associated with the assessment of products, processes, or personnel. For software-intensive safety-critical systems, certification of products and processes are regarded as being the most challenging BIB003 . Assessing and assuring safety of a system relies on building sufficient confidence in the safe operation of the system in its operating context. This confidence is often developed by satisfying safety objectives that mitigate the potential safety risks that a system can pose during its lifecycle. The safety objectives are usually established by a set of industry-accepted criteria, typically available as standards. Examples of safety standards include IEC61508  for a broad class of programmable electronic systems, DO-178C  for aviation, the CENELEC standards (e.g.,  ) for railway, and ISO26262  for the automotive sector. Demonstrating compliance with safety standards involves collecting evidence that shows that the relevant safety criteria in the standards are met BIB006 . Although, safety standards prescribe the procedures for compliance, it often proves to be a very challenging task to the system suppliers due to the fact that these standards are presented in very large textual documents that are subject to interpretation. In general, evidence can be defined as "The available body of facts or information indicating whether a belief or proposition is true or valid" [30] . For realistically large systems, however, one can seldom argue that evidence serves as a definitive proof of the truth or validity of safety claims, but only whether the evidence is sufficient for building (adequate) confidence in the claims. Hence, we define evidence for safety certification as "information or artefacts that contribute to developing confidence in the safe operation of a system and to showing the fulfilment of the requirements of one or more safety standards". Some generic examples of safety evidence are test results, system specifications, and personnel competence. The lack of consistent interpretation of a standard can lead to misunderstanding the evidence needs. Failing to clearly understand the evidence needs for assessing a system can result in two main problems BIB002  . First, the supplier may fail to record critical details during system development that the certifier will require later on. Building the missing evidence after-the-fact can be both expensive and laborious. Second, not knowing ahead of time what the certifiers will receive as evidence may affect the planning and organisation of the certification activities. In particular, the certifier may find it hard to develop sufficient confidence in the system undergoing certification if the evidence requirements have not been negotiated and agreed with the supplier a priori  BIB001 . Apart from understanding and precisely defining the evidence requirements, attention needs to be paid to how this evidence is organised and assessed for adequacy. If the evidence is not structured properly, its sheer volume and complexity can jeopardize the clarity of the safety arguments  . Furthermore, it is important to be able to determine how definitive and credible the evidence is. Though safety standards mandate adequate evidence to show compliance, they are vague on what adequate means in a particular context, often intentionally and for the sake of being general. The main objective of this paper is to synthesise the existing knowledge in the academic literature about safety evidence, concentrating on the three facets outlined above: the information that constitutes evidence; structuring of evidence; and evidence assessment. The term evidence provision is used hereafter to collectively refer to these three facets. Alongside, we analyse the challenges and needs in safety evidence provision and perform a domain analysis BIB001 to identify the commonalities among different application domains for this purpose. We achieve our objective by means of a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) -a documented and repeatable process through which the literature on a given subject is examined and the current state of knowledge is recorded  . The main advantage of a SLR, when compared to ad hoc search, is that it provides a higher degree of confidence about covering the relevant literature and thus minimises subjectivity and bias. Our SLR draws on 218 peer-reviewed publications, selected out of 4873, through a multi-stage process. A key feature of the review is that it does not restrict itself to a particular domain or safety standard. This broad scope in the search gives us deeper insights on the state of the art. Additionally, the breadth helps in understanding the commonalities among the different domains in terms of how evidence is perceived, structured and assessed, in turn enabling improvements in the domains that do not yet enforce stringent certification requirements, e.g., the automotive sector. As part of our work, we classify into a hierarchical taxonomy the various information and artefacts considered as evidence for compliance with safety standards. The taxonomy includes 49 basic evidence types and is, to our knowledge, the most comprehensive classification of safety evidence built to date. This taxonomy is a good reference for understanding and further elaborating the evidence requirements for specific standards and specific systems. The other outcomes of the SLR, namely the survey of approaches for evidence structuring and assessment, the overview of challenges and needs, and a domain analysis to identify commonalities, will be a useful guide for developing a detailed map of the field and for defining a future research agenda on safety certification. Our study notably indicates that a large majority of the approaches surveyed have not been validated in realistic settings and thus provide little information about their practical utility. An important recommendation for future research on safety certification is therefore for the research to be more rigorous from an empirical standpoint and more oriented towards industry needs. The SLR has been conducted as part of OPENCOSS [25] , which is a large-scale European research project on safety certification in the railway, aviation and automotive domains. The work we present here extends an earlier conference paper BIB005 . The main extensions are: (1) the addition of a new data source, namely Google Scholar, thereby increasing the number of primary studies; (2) significant expansion of the description of the research method and the results; and (3) our domain analysis (mentioned above). The rest of the paper is organised as follows. Section 2 discusses related work. Section 3 describes the research method used. Section 4 presents the SLR results. Section 5 discusses the implications of these results on research and practice. Section 6 discusses the threats to validity of the review. Finally, Section 7 presents our conclusions and future work.