Managing Process Compliance

Abstract

The current best practice of providing reliable systems is to embody the development process in recent industry standards and guidelines, such as IEC61508 for safety and ISO9001 for quality assurance. These standards are generic, but every application is different because of the differences in project details. While current workflow systems have been used successfully in managing “administrative” process for some time, current products lack the ability to ensure that a process is planned and performed such that it complies with an industry standard that is necessary to support particular engineering processes. This chapter presents a Compliance Flow Workflow System for managing processes. Model-based reasoning is used to identify the compliance errors of a process by matching it against the model of standards used. Some examples drawing on a draft version of IEC61508 are used to illustrate the mechanism of modeling and compliance checks.