Engineering, Communication, and Safety

Accurate and complete communication between human stakeholders is critical to the successful development of any engineered system. This is particularly significant in the case of safety-critical systems, where incomplete or incorrect communication has the potential to cause great harm. There have been many attempts to address communication in engineering, including the development of formal specification languages and data dictionaries. No one technique is a silver bullet and all come at a cost. For each communication flow, developers must select and employ a combination of techniques that they can justifiably claim is adequate given their system’s reliance upon that flow. In this paper, we discuss communication in the engineering process and introduce Assurance Based Communication, a development methodology that helps developers to understand how their systems depend upon communication so that they can select techniques appropriately.