IEC 63187: Engineering Safety into Complex Defense Systems
, , , , Safety in an Agile Environment: the International Systems Safety Conference 2023, Portland, OR.
Abstract
IEC 63187 is the new defense sector safety framework being developed by the International Electrotechnical Commission. Defense applications are typically complex systems, built from individual elements that may also be both technically and managerially complex themselves: developed under different lifecycle models by different suppliers, to different standards, at different times. Defense systems are also subject to dynamic changes of risk, as the context of their deployment changes. Existing safety standards are not well suited to this level of complexity. They tend to be aimed at single organizations rather than complex hierarchies, and to focus on the failures of system elements, rather than important emergent properties of the overall system. The new international standard in development, IEC 63187, tackles these problems using modern systems engineering principles. It applies the ISO/IEC/IEEE 15288 life cycle processes to supplement IEC 61508 and other safety standards, proposing an approach that allows requirements to be tailored to the risk and managed across multiple system layers. This framework is designed to be open, for compatibility with different lifecycle models, different national approaches to assurance and risk acceptance, and different realization standards for individual system elements. This paper discusses the motivation, principles and approach of IEC 63187 and gives an update on the draft’s progress through the standardization process.