Software support for incident reporting systems in safety-critical applications

Incident reporting systems are playing an increasingly important role in the development and maintenance of safety-critical applications. The perceived success of the FAA's Aviation Safety Reporting System (ASRS) and the FDA's MedWatch has led to the establishment of similar national and international schemes. These enable individuals and groups to report their safety concerns in a confidential or anonymous manner. Unfortunately, many of these systems are becoming victims of their own success. The ASRS and MedWatch have both now received over 500,000 submissions. In the past, these systems have relied upon conventional database technology to support the indexing and retrieval of individual reports. However, there are several reasons why this technology is inadequate for many large-scale reporting schemes. In particular, the problems of query formation often result in poor precision and recall, This, in turn, has profound implications for safety-critical applications. Users may fail to identify similar incidents within national or international collections. This paper, therefore, shows how several alternative software architectures support incident report systems in safety-critical applications.