Functional Safety and Proof of Compliance

This book aims to facilitate and improve development work related to all documents and information required by functional safety standards.

Proof of Compliance (PoC) is important for the assessor and certification bodies when called up to confirm that the manufacturer has developed a software system according to the required safety standards. While PoC documents add functionality to the product neither for the developer nor for the customer, they do add confidence and trust to the product and ease certification, and as such are important for the product's value. In spite of this added value, the documentation needed for PoC is often developed late in the project and in a haphazard manner.

This book aims at developers, assessors, certification bodies, and purchasers of safety instrumented systems and informs the reader about the most important PoC documents. A typical PoC documentation encompasses 50 to 200 documents, several of which are named in the safety standards (e.g., 82 documents in IEC 61508:2010 series, 101 documents in EN 5012X series and 106 work products in ISO 26262:2018 series). These documents also include further references, typically one to twenty of them, and the total number of pages developed by the manufacturer varies between 2000 and 10000 pages. The book provides guidance and examples what to include in the relevant plans and documents.

Thor Myklebust is a senior safety assessor, business developer and researcher at SINTEF Digital in Norway, where he is involved in mainly international and national development and research projects. He has participated in several international committees since 1988, been a member of safety IEC 65, the IEC 61508 international committee, railway CENELEC/TC 9 and NB-rail (notified bodies) since 2007. In addition, he was vice chair of NB-Rail in 2014 and chairman of NB-Rail in 2015. He is also one of the founders of SafeScrum(R), a methodology for agile development of safety-critical software.

Tor Stålhane is professor emeritus at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim. He holds a PhD in statistics and is currently doing research in software engineering and system safety analysis. He, too, is one of the founders of SafeScrum(R).