How to do System of System Hazard Analysis (per Standard)

Introduction

Hello everyone and welcome to the Safety Artisan. I'm Simon and today we're going to be talking about System of Systems Hazard Analysis – a bit of a mouthful. What does it mean? Well, we shall see.

System of Systems Hazard Analysis

So, for Systems of Systems Hazard Analysis, we're using task 209 as the description of what to do taken from a military standard, 882E. But to be honest, it doesn't matter whether you're doing a military system or a civil system, whatever it might be - if you've got a system of systems, then this will help you to do it.

Topics for this Session

Let's see what's coming up. So, we look at the purpose of a system of systems – and by the way, if you're wondering what that is what I'm talking about is when we take different things that we’ve developed elsewhere, e.g. platforms, electronic systems, whatever it might be, and we put them together. Usually, with humans gluing the system together somewhere, it must be said, to make it all tick and fit together. Then we want this collection of systems to do something new, to give us some new capability, that we didn't have before. So, that's what I'm talking about when I say system of systems. I'll show you an example – it’s the best way. So, we've got a couple of slides on task description, a couple of slides, or documentation, and a couple of slides on contracting. Task 209 is a very short task, and therefore I've decided to go through an example. So, we’ve got seven slides of an example of a system of systems, safety case and safety case report that I wrote. And hopefully, that will illustrate far better than just reading out the description. And that will also give us some issues that can emerge with systems of systems and I'll summarize those at the end.

SOSHA Purpose

So, let's get on. I’m going to call it the SOSHA for short; Systems of Systems Hazard Analysis. The purpose of the SOSHA, task 209, is to document or perform and document the analysis of the system of systems and identify unique system of systems hazards. So, things we don't get from each system in isolation. This task is going to produce special requirements to deal with these hazards, which otherwise would not exist. Until we put the things together and start using them for something new – We've not done this before.