[SystemSafety] Call for Submissions

[Andreoli, Kevin (UK)]

The website says:
"Examples include health and well-being apps that can be used on a mobile device, digital models for 3D printing or apps controlling other devices (such as electronic appliances)."

I read this to mean they are looking into the safety of mobile 'phone apps including those which monitor exercise or diet, also those designed to control devices in the home. (The so-called Internet Of Things (IOT))

I can quite see that an App telling you to do exercises which are inadvisable or even downright dangerous have a (Health and) Safety concern.  Apps (mis)controlling your home appliances when no-one is at home are certainly a risk.

I wish them luck legislating for those type of risks - one for the Risks Forum/Digest.


Kevin
--
Usual disclaimer regarding employer.

-----Original Message-----
From: systemsafety [mailto:systemsafety-bounces at lists.techfak.uni-bielefeld.de] On Behalf Of Peter Bernard Ladkin
Sent: 25 August 2016 09:38
To: The System Safety List
Subject: [SystemSafety] Call for Submissions

Barrister Stephen Mason http://www.stephenmason.eu sent me a heads-up on the EU performing a consultation on the safety of apps. Non-embedded apps.

https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/news/public-consultation-safety-apps-and-other-non-embedded-software

This seems prima facie weird. According to standard (engineering) definitions, such apps are not safety-related, period. It could be that the EU is looking for connections with safety which do not fit standard conceptions.

One model for a non-standard conception is ATC. (Although it is odd to call it "non-standard", I guess, since the system has been around way longer than the "standard" conceptions. Indeed, if one dates the initialisation of positive control to the 1956 Grand Canyon collision, it is three times as long.)

Let us consider airspace with 100% primary and secondary radar coverage. The data-gathering/-distribution/-display systems (let me call it real-time traffic display, RTTD) used by ATCOs obviously have a connection with safety in that an ATCO can take/inappropriate inappropriate actions on aircraft separation if the current traffic situation is not veridically displayed.

The safety of the airspace system could be defined in terms of the maintenance of appropriate separation of all participating aircraft, and more generally separation of participating aircraft from all other aircraft. Put briefly: no airproxes (however you might choose to define airprox).

Maintenance of safety is composed of three factors which form a causal chain: veridical RTTD; correct procedural actions by the ATCO based on the RTTD information; conformant execution of the agreed actions by flight crew.

Functional safety of the RTTD is guaranteed: RTTD paints pixels on screens and there are no known dangerous failures of painting pixels on screens. But it is equally clear that misleading information followed by nominally-appropriate action by an ATCO on that information followed by nominally-appropriate response by flight crew can result in loss of separation and thus an airprox.
In other words, a failure of dependability properties of the RTTD can by itself lead to a hazardous event; it does not need to be compounded with other failures.

The point is here that the behaviour of the other components of the causal chain is regulated, more or less completely.

So I guess the point of the consultation might be to elicit such causal chains in which the behaviour of an app in a causal chain can be similarly be sole cause.

But notice how the situation must be constructed. If the specific behaviour of the app can be mitigated by a change in behaviour of another agent in the chain, say by a human, then it can't be sole cause: an additional causal factor is that the mitigating behaviour did not occur. So unless the app executes in a context in which the behaviour of other actors is rigorously constrained, as in ATC, the app can't be sole cause of a hazardous event.

It'll be interesting to see what comes out of the consultation.

PBL

Prof. Peter Bernard Ladkin, Bielefeld, Germany MoreInCommon Je suis Charlie
Tel+msg +49 (0)521 880 7319  www.rvs-bi.de





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