Assuring a Complex Safety-Critical Systems of Systems

This paper introduces a broad assurance approach for developing a complex, safety-critical System of Systems (SoS) in order to supplement some guidance that exists in the industry today. Drawing on these varied guidance sources for the assurance of specific technologies and others for developing a modern complex system (or SoS), this paper combines these to present objective-based criteria to assure a complex safety-critical SoS. This guidance can enable a person or team to write a complete objective-based development assurance plan for a complex safety-critical SoS and create completion criteria to use for recognizing when it is done.