Safety Process Patterns: Demystifying Safety Standards

Development of safety critical embedded systems is regulated by legislation and related standards. However, at least for beginners in the field, the standards are relatively hard to understand hindering their practical applicability. In this paper, we propose using process patterns to document the requirements for different lifecycle phases set in the safety standards. Ideally, such patterns could make these standards accessible to a wider audience of potential users. Moreover, the companies using the standards could enhance their quality manuals with the help of the patterns. In addition to the requirements set in the standards, the patterns should capture best practices in implementing the requirements. Such best practices could be application domain specific or company specific, according to the purpose of use and availability of information. To demonstrate our approach, we present example patterns identified from the IEC 61508-3 ed2.0 standard.