Patterns for Certification Standards

One of the absolute preconditions for a safety-critical system to enter the market is to be issued a certificate by the regulating authorities. To this end, the “applicant” must demonstrate the compliance of its product with the domain’s standards. The high complexity of this process has led applicants to rely on assurance cases made for certification in the medical, nuclear, or aeronautic domains. In this paper, we propose a generic method that guides the applicant through the specification of assurance cases for a complex standard. Unlike existing works focused on a single context, our objective is to provide an approach that is both generic and domain-agnostic. In order to illustrate this new approach, we present the results of its application on a real-world case study, which pointed out new issues and led to improvements.