New project to develop best practice safety assurance framework for autonomous systems

Demonstrating a strong system safety argument is a critical part of any safety assurance process.

This demonstration attests to an autonomous system’s capacity to meet safety requirements and is a crucial step for enabling true integration of highly automated and autonomous systems into the air, maritime, and land domains. Without this process it is difficult to demonstrate any sort of confidence in an autonomous system’s safety and reliability characteristics.

However, current system safety processes assume a level of human control and authority during operation as well as other assumptions around the level of autonomy, acceptable mitigations etc. of a system. This makes it difficult for more highly automated and autonomous systems to demonstrate complete compliance with these safety analyses and their requirements.

TAS is proud to announce that we are working with Frazer-Nash Consultancy to develop a safety assurance framework to help tackle these challenges as a part of the TAS Body of Knowledge.

The framework is intended to augment, not replace, the current system safety processes and provide complementary techniques, processes, and methods relevant to highly automated and autonomous systems. This will create the stepping-stones needed to bridge those gaps between the current processes and what is needed to truly integrate these systems into the domains.

The project will culminate in high level guidance documentation on the overall system safety analysis process. It will also produce a repository of useful standards and research that will assist in completing detailed safety analyses referenced in this documentation.

If you are interested in finding out more or would like more information on the TAS Body of Knowledge, please contact us at NASFP@tasdcrc.com.au.