A new method for safety assessment of complex avionic systems

In this article, we propose a new approach for safety assessment of safety-critical systems. This approach, so-called Synthesis, is dedicated to the Preliminary System Safety Assessment included within the process of Safety Certification of avionic systems. The central idea consists in decomposing the assessment into two parts aiming at studying respectively the functional and the physical characteristics of the system under study. The whole approach is supported by a fully operational tool chain, dedicated to probabilistic safety assessment, which includes the AltaRica 3.0 integrated modeling environment, and a tool dedicated to the synthesis of functional minimal cutsets into physical minimal cutsets, making possible their quantitative assessment. We illustrate the benefits of the approach by means of a concrete avionic case study.