Data-Centric Safety: Challenges, Approaches, and Incident Investigation

Data-Centric Safety presents core concepts and principles of system safety management, and then guides the reader through the application of these techniques and measures to Data-Centric Systems (DCS). The authors have compiled their decades of experience in industry and academia to provide guidance on the management of safety risk. Data Safety has become increasingly important as many solutions depend on data for their correct and safe operation and assurance. The book’s content covers the definition and use of data. It recognises that data is frequently used as the basis of operational decisions and that DCS are often used to reduce user oversight. This data is often invisible, hidden. DCS analysis is based on a Data Safety Model (DSM). The DSM provides the basis for a toolkit leading to improvement recommendations. It also discusses operation and oversight of DCS and the organisations that use them. The content covers incident management, providing an outline for incident response. Incident investigation is explored to address evidence collection and management.

Current standards do not adequately address how to manage data (and the errors it may contain) and this leads to incidents, possibly loss of life. The DSM toolset is based on Interface Agreements to create soft boundaries to help engineers facilitate proportionate analysis, rationalisation and management of data safety. Data-Centric Safety is ideal for engineers who are working in the field of data safety management.

This book will help developers and safety engineers to:

Determine what data can be used in safety systems, and what it can be used forVerify that the data being used is appropriate and has the right characteristics, illustrated through a set of application areasEngineer their systems to ensure they are robust to data errors and failures

I. Data-Centric Safety 1. Introduction 2. System Safety Management 3. Challenges to Systems Engineering 

II. Data-Centric Fundamentals 4. Data Fundamentals 5. Data-Centric Systems 6. System Context 7. System Definition

III. Data-Centric Design 8. Data-Centric Architecture 9. Development 10. Acceptance and Approval

IV. Operational Management and Maintenance 11. Operational Matters 12. Live Management and Control

V. Incident Investigation 13. Major Incident Response 14. Investigation Management  15. DCI Investigation Methods 16. Incident Investigation 17. Investigation Methodology Maturity 18. Analysis as Part of a DCI 19. Incident Report

VI. Data Safety Model 20. Data Safety Model 21. Using the DSM 22. Validation

VII. Application Areas  23. Autonomous Flight 24. Enterprise 25. Healthcare

VIII. References