A Means of Assessing the Entire Functional Safety Hazard Space

The goal behind Functional Safety is to anticipate the potential hazard scenarios (a.k.a. harm sequences) that a system may produce and address those scenarios in such a way as to mitigate or even eliminate them. A major challenge in determining hazard scenarios is trying to assess an adequate amount of scenarios, considering the large size of a hazard space. Typically assessing the entire hazard space is difficult to achieve, resulting in the possibility of overlooking some critical scenarios that can result in harm to either system operators, system by-standers, or both. In this paper we will explore a rule-based approach for concisely describing hazard scenarios, which could potentially enable us to examine the entire hazard space in a short amount of time. Our approach, called Hazard Space Analysis, combines three key activates: determining hazard scenarios, assigning a risk factor to those scenarios, and mapping those hazard scenarios directly to safety rules. We will detail the approach, show how the approach could be automated, and present a simple aviation related example that demonstrates the approach's potential in enabling stakeholders to explore a large hazard space.