Vision of a framework for design guides for development of safety critical applications

Safety critical systems are strictly controlled and monitored along their whole life cycle from requirements elicitation and system development to utilization, modernizations and decommissioning. Often such systems need also to be licensed to suit their intended purpose, which is a demanding and complicated task. This paper first introduces the most important concepts and principles of designing safety critical I&C systems, especially for the nuclear industry. The importance of the research topic is justified and validation and licensing processes are discussed. General design requirements and other types of requirements related mainly on system modernizations are introduced as well. The paper presents an idea of a framework for design guides and provides a preliminary example to illustrate the concept. Finally, there is an outlook on the future plans and becoming work.