The book's structure

 The book has three major parts:

• Background concepts, which helps the reader to understand Safety Case Reports and the concepts that influenced the proposed report format, and discusses practical issues associated with current practice

• Using the Safety Case Report format, which addresses the task of preparing the Safety Case Report

• Specification of the Safety Case Report format, which provides a detailed specification and guidance on the presentation and contents of an Safety Case Report

The third part of the book, ‘Specification of the Safety Case Report format’, provides a detailed specification and guidance on the presentation and contents of an Safety Case Report, in the following sections:

• Front Material

• Section 1 Introduction

• Section 2 Scope

• Section 3 is concerned with the presentation of the material that is not specific to an individual transitional stage in the Safety Case Report.

• Section 4 is concerned with the presentation of the material for a single transitional stage in the Safety Case Report.

• Section 5 details the extent of the material that needs to be included from the safety case in section 4.12 of the Safety Case Report (for each transitional stage).

Each section of the report format is described in terms of ‘what the section is about’ and ‘why it is needed’. This is followed by detailed recommendations for the content that should be provided in that section of the report, and any additional relevant guidance to assist the report authors. 

The format expects an extract of the safety case to be included, and so Section 5 describes the extent of the extract in terms of the claims, arguments and evidence that would usually be included or précised in the report.

The Safety Case Report format offered in the book has been designed to help convey the arguments and evidence of a safety case to a diverse audience in an accessible form, and was developed to satisfy what the authors believe is logically expected from a complete Safety Case Report. This was informed by the comprehensive and generic method for assessing safety cases, previously written by the authors (CAP 1801). Hence, the format provides a generically applicable basis that can be tailored for a specific industry sector or project.

The format has been made to cover a wide range of scenarios for safety cases by addressing one of the most complex, a change that is made in several stages to an existing system that is providing one or more services. The safety cases for other scenarios (e.g. new services, existing services and decommissioning) only require a subset of what is required to be addressed for a change to an existing service.