CAP 1801

The book needed a sound basis for the scope, structure and detail of the format, and these could have been developed from first principles. The authors had previously derived and documented a systematic approach to assessing a safety case for a change, the most complex scenario for a safety case report. This therefore defined everything an assessor would ideally get from a Safety Case Report, and so provided the sought-for sound basis. 

The approach is publicly available as a research publication, CAP 1801 ‘The assessment of change safety cases’. It is freely downloadable from the UK Civil Aviation Authority's website at https://www.caa.co.uk/cap1801.

The following text is an abbreviated extract from CAP 1801’s Executive Summary:

The guidance is not specific to any one particular application domain. It therefore encompasses everything that might be necessary to check any change safety case, without regard to whether it is proportionate for the change in question.

The guidance is organised around the logically necessary documentary artefacts that are part of the safety argument in a completed change safety case, and provides a sufficient set of candidate assessment activities for each artefact, and for the argument itself. Consequently, the approach is applicable to any safety argument, regardless of its structure and presentation.

The guidance is generic and applicable to all types of change in all types of context. It may be beneficial to instantiate the guidance for changes in a specific domain or context, or for specific types of change. Such instantiation could usefully include incorporating any specific regulatory provisions or risk criteria for the domain.