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The SCSC publishes a range of documents:

Newsletter

The club publishes its newsletter Safety Systems three times a year in February, June and October.  The newsletter is distributed to paid-up members and can be made available in electronic form for inclusion on corporate members' intranet sites.

Symposium proceedings

The proceedings of the annual symposium, held each February since 1993, are published in book form. Since 2013 copies can be purchased from Amazon.

Safety-Critical Systems eJournal

The club publishes the Safety-critical Systems eJournal (ISSN 2754-1118) containing high-quality, peer-reviewed articles on the subject of systems safety.
 If you are interested in being an author or a reviewer please see the Call for Papers.

All publications are available to download free by current SCSC members (please log in first), recent books are available as 'print on demand' from Amazon at reasonable cost.

All PublicationsPage

Oct 2024
The Safety-Critical Systems Club Newsletter, Volume 32, Number 3
May 2024
The Safety-Critical Systems Club Newsletter, Volume 32, Number 2
Mar 2024
[SCSC-191] Safety-Critical Systems eJournal vol.3 no.1
 Journal cover image
Winter Issue 2024
Edited by John Spriggs
Ref: ISSN 2754-1118
Publisher: Safety-Critical Systems Club
Editorial to the 2024 Winter Issue 
Welcome to the first issue of the third volume of the Safety-Critical Systems eJournal, which is  …   

Editorial to the 2024 Winter Issue

 

Welcome to the first issue of the third volume of the Safety-Critical Systems eJournal, which is published by the Safety Critical Systems Club (SCSC).

This is a themed issue, published to coincide with the Safety-Critical Systems Symposium, SSS’24. The theme is the technologies underpinning autonomous vehicles and how we assure them. The original brief was broad: for example "technologies", as well as vision processing, machine learning, etc., can include things like concepts of operation, regulation, standards, ownership of liability, and so on. Note that autonomous systems are influenced by human factors too.

The new cover image for this year includes logic, emergent properties, and machine learning motifs to mark the launch of the Club’s new Working Group, Safe AI. Joining instructions will be announced at SSS’24. If you would like to find out more about this group, please go to their page on the SCSC website: https://scsc.uk/gb

John Spriggs SCSC eJournal Editor
john.spriggs@scsc.uk

  
Download:

Contents

Paper: Breaking the Tyranny of Net Risk Metrics for Automated Vehicle Safety - Philip Koopman and William H. Widen
An inquiry into how safe might be “safe enough” for automated vehicle technology must go far beyond the superficial “safer than a human driver”  …    An inquiry into how safe might be “safe enough” for automated vehicle technology must go far beyond the superficial “safer than a human driver” metric to yield an answer that will be workable in practice. Issues include the complexities of creating a like-for-like human driver baseline for comparison, avoiding risk transfer despite net risk reduction, avoiding negligent computer driver behaviour, conforming to industry consensus safety standards as a basis to justify predictions of net safety improvement, avoiding regulatory problems with unreasonably dangerous specific features despite improved net safety, and avoiding problematic ethical and equity outcomes. In this paper we explore how addressing these topics holistically will create a more robust framework for establishing acceptable automated vehicle safety.  
Paper: Principles of Conceptual Analysis for Electrotechnical Terminology (ConcAn) - Peter Bernard Ladkin
The term Conceptual Analysis has a storied history in philosophy, in particular in the 20th Century. I argue here for a specific application to  …    The term Conceptual Analysis has a storied history in philosophy, in particular in the 20th Century. I argue here for a specific application to electrotechnical terminology, ConcAn. I suggest the necessity for ConcAn by considering a contemporary example from the IEC. I then elucidate some principles of, and illustrate, ConcAn by means of a running example, the notion of reliability. There are likely important principles still to discover.  
Paper: The Open Autonomy Safety Case Framework - Michael Wagner and Carmen Carlan
A system safety case is a compelling, comprehensible, and valid argument about the satisfaction of the safety goals of a given system operating in  …    A system safety case is a compelling, comprehensible, and valid argument about the satisfaction of the safety goals of a given system operating in a given environment supported by convincing evidence. Since the publication of UL 4600 in 2020, safety cases have become a best practice for measuring, managing, and communicating the safety of autonomous vehicles (AVs). Although UL 4600 provides guidance on how to build the safety case for an AV, the complexity of AVs and their operating environments, the novelty of the used technology, the need for complying with various regulations and technical standards, and for addressing cybersecurity concerns and ethical considerations make the development of safety cases for AVs challenging. To this end, safety case frameworks have been proposed that bring strategies, argument templates, and other guidance together to support the development of a safety case. This paper introduces the Open Autonomy Safety Case Framework, developed over years of work with the autonomous vehicle industry, as a roadmap for how AVs can be deployed safely and responsibly.  
Paper: Human Factors in Functional Safety Assessment - Jonathan Wiggins
This paper provides a discussion on the physical and emotional factors which humans bring into the design, execution, and maintenance of a  …    This paper provides a discussion on the physical and emotional factors which humans bring into the design, execution, and maintenance of a Functionally Safe System. It aims to bring these elements together in a structured manner and suggests potential assessment criteria for use by practitioners in this field to allow the assessment of Human Factors into an IEC 61508 or related safety system, though no limitation is intended as the basic methods may be modified for other fields. This paper does not go into specific applications, rather looks at a generic approach as a basis from which sector specific factors may be added. This paper provides a basis for the building of Key Performance Indicators to baseline, measure, and compare differing elements in the Human Factor assessment against a suggested target for a given Systematic Capability level. This is in the context of an audit-based assessment attempting to minimise the effect of bias on the process to bring the often-subjective elements into an objective and measurable format.  
Feb 2024
by the SCSC Data Safety Initiative Working Group [DSIWG]
Feb 2024
Proceedings of the Thirty Second Safety-Critical Systems Symposium.
Feb 2024
The Safety-Critical Systems Club Newsletter, Volume 32, Number 1
Dec 2023
The Safety-Critical Systems Club Newsletter, Volume 31, Numbers 1-3
Oct 2023
The Safety-Critical Systems Club Newsletter, Volume 31, Number 3