Development of an Electronic Safety Case for a Military Communication, Command and Control System

The modern infantry soldier is expected to operate across a wide spectrum of operational scenarios from war fighting to humanitarian aid. Deployments can be National, International Single/Joint Services or as part of a coalition with other international services. Key to success in any military operation is the ability for personnel at the combat level to manage and control their environment and to directly influence their situation. This needs to be done in real-time, through decisive actions base on sound and safe situational awareness information. An integrated digital soldier system has recently been designed and developed, which allows combat units to monitor and react to the 'chaos of battle'. This digital mapping, navigation and communication capability has a recognised relationship to the safe operation of combat capability and as such requires an explicit safety argument with associated evidence to demonstrate that residual risk is as low as reasonably practicable. This paper presents the real example of how the risk evaluation and preliminary safety case development was actually done for this new equipment. It was an expression of wish that the safety case would be in electronic format using graphical notations. In this way, the case for safety could be demonstrated remotely and used as programme submission evidence as part of key gateways early in the military procurement cycle. This paper will present the key stages that the programme team went through in developing the preliminary safety case, from hazard identification through to graphical argument construction and on to publication. During this relatively short project it has also been possible to record the resource effort used through this component of the programme, so this is also presented as rich evidence for future programmes.