Understanding what IT means for assurance cases to work task order: the current air transportation system is remarkably safe. IT is so safe that traveling by airplane is often thought to be the safest…

This is a cost-plus-fixed-fee task order contract awarded by the Langley Research Center of NASA to Saab Inc.'s Safety & Efficiency Division, a subsidiary of the Swedish defense and security company Saab Aktiebolag. The $112,456.33 task order is part of the Flight Critical Systems Research program and is focused on investigating the use of assurance cases in the design, certification, operation, modification, and maintenance of safety-critical aviation systems, particularly for the Next Generation Air Transportation System (NextGen). The task order aims to provide a comprehensive overview of the benefits, processes, and evidence related to using assurance cases for ensuring the safety of complex, interconnected aviation systems and procedures. This task order does not have a set-aside designation.

Understanding what IT means for assurance cases to work task order: the current air transportation system is remarkably safe. IT is so safe that traveling by airplane is often thought to be the safest means of travel possible today. A myriad of different reasons contribute to the current high level of safety, including conservative adoption of new technologies, careful introduction of automation to augment human capabilities, and thoughtful reliance on experience for establishing safety-ensuring processes and regulations. However, the complexity and inter-connectivity of the systems, procedures, and processes proposed for the next generation air transportation system (nextgen) cast doubts on whether these reasons will continue to apply, and thus on whether the current approaches to ensuring safety will continue to suffice. The safe aviation future evolution (safe) technical challenge of the shadow mode assessment using realistic technologies for the national airspace system (smart-NAS) project of the aviation operations and safety program (aosp) includes research exploring whether assurance cases may provide a way to remove some of these doubts. This task specifically addresses the question of how assurance cases are used in the design, certification, operation, modification, and maintenance of critical systems and what IT means for them to be fit for those purposes. The scope of this task order is to investigate the current best practices in using assurance cases in the development and approval of safety-critical systems. The objective of this task order is to deliver a document that provides a comprehensive overview of: (a) the benefit that assurance cases are thought to bring to the developers, certifiers, operators, and maintainers of aviation-related and other systems; (b) how assurance cases are thought to bring this benefit, (c) the necessary and sufficient conditions for assurance cases to provide this benefit, and (d) evidence thought to show such a benefit or the satisfaction of such a condition.