SafeTRANS Industrial Day 2008

Risk Reduction in Complex System Design

A paper presented at the 5th SafeTRANS Industrial Day in December 2008 in Hamburg, Germany, focussed on design methodology to significantly reduce the risk in development of complex systems.

It is shown that traditional design processes can neither validate systems nor optimize at Mission/Operational Level. Many critical design problems have to be resolved during system integration, when monthly development expenditure are at a maximum and design risk is high.

A design methodology is presented that solves critical integration problems through the use of executable specifications in early design stages when expenditure is low, significantly reducing design risk.

Examples as the development of avionic control systems, transfer alignment in navigation, embedded software systems for satellites and aircraft level architecture optimization demostrate why traditional design approaches failure and how the mission level design approach leads to significant reduction of the design risk.