The Benefits of Electronic Safety Cases

Abstract

There is an increasing demand by society for safety critical systems not only to be safe, but also to be seen to be safe. With increasing product complexity this is placing a significant load upon both the safety community and project budgets. Partially in response to these challenges Praxis has been increasingly using processes that make use of internet-technologies to develop electronic safety cases for a number of years, both to improve quality and to reduce costs and workload upon project teams. This initially ad-hoc approach to the use of internet technologies has now evolved into a commercial product - the eSafetyCase toolkit. The toolkit extends the basic process further and allows other organisations to gain the benefits of this approach. Use of this toolkit has significantly informed our opinions on the use of electronic safety cases.

This paper outlines the potential benefits of developing electronic safety cases to those in the safety engineering chain including: society, regulators, ISAs, companies, projects and safety case developers. Additionally this paper shows how some of these benefits can be achieved using the eSafetyCase Toolkit.