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The SCSC publishes a range of documents:
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.
The proceedings of the annual symposium, held each February since 1993, are published in book form. Since 2013 copies can be purchased from Amazon.
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.
This year has seen unprecedented intervention and management effort to try and control the Covid-19 pandemic. Many of the initiatives introduced have been implemented explicitly through services (e.g. Test and Trace) or based on services (e.g. Vaccination), and are clearly safety-related. Failures of these services (e.g. the loss of contact information through the poor use of Excel in mid-2020) are a potential problem, which likely led to more infections, consequential hospitalisations and deaths. These Covid-19 related services should therefore have some assurance. Sadly, this has been largely absent to date, partly due to the rapid deployment of these services, but also due to lack of recognition that these are true safety-related services.>/p>
This document provides guidance for the assurance of services in a safety context. It was produced by the SCSC Service Assurance Working Group (SAWG), 2017-2021.
This document provides guidance on the assurance of services when there are safety implications associated with the use of those services. These services we call “safety-related services”; typical examples might be an ambulance dispatch service or an air traffic control service.
Following a discussion of exactly what constitutes a “Service”, this guidance covers services that operate largely autonomously and services that only function with, and alongside humans.
This guidance is aimed at services that are genuinely safety-related. Excluded services, which are considered critical, but not safety-related, include banking services or public broadcasting.
A set of principles for assuring services (as opposed to systems) is proposed. The guidance explains how they may be applied in a service provision situation. These principles are domain agnostic and can be used across a wide range of service scenarios in diverse sectors.
Further guidance is provided on how to apply the principles through objectives and how to address the challenges that may be encountered.
Methods and techniques applicable to service situations are covered. Analyses are listed for identifying undesired behaviour where assurance is required.
Of particular significance is how to show that the intent of the service assurance requirements is maintained through the service definition, service architecture and the agreements made at service interfaces (e.g. Service Level Agreements (SLAs)) and that the principles are preserved through change.
The approach described in this guidance draws upon concepts from modular assurance and illustrates the different types of “wrapper” that can be used to manage the variety of assurance positions presented by services: these can vary widely in nature as the confidence in the assurance of intended behaviour can be difficult to establish.
The principles are linked to objectives and characteristics to show how high-level requirements can be established for assured services.