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How to Build a Safety Case
How to Develop a Safety Case:
Developing safety cases can be a daunting task, but it really does not have to be. Safety arguments should be thorough, but by a simple step by step process, clear and thorough safety arguments can be developed and can help guide the design and engineering of the project. Once a team has determined a real world problem to focus on they can begin developing a safety case.
Fundamental Steps to Build a Safety Case:
- Identify potential environmental hazards
- Design a BioBricks to help solve the problem & engineer them
- Toward the end of the design phase, it should be possible to determine specific environmental hazards and the engineered organism’s dependability requirements
- As the design evolves, update potential environmental hazards
- Understand requirements for reliability of the parts
- Obtain evidence to strengthen safety argument claims from wet lab results, previous iGEM results or results in literature
- Perform lab simulations and test the system
- If refactoring is required to accomplish team goals, refactor the design of the BioBricks as needed and jump to Step 3
- Create a clear succinct presentable format for the safety case
- A diagram form following Goal Structuring Notation would be appropriate
- Evaluate the strength of safety arguments
The following figure is the diagram view of a sample safety case Dr. Myra Cohen and Dr. Massimiliano Pierobon have developed for the 2012 iGEM Food Warden project.
B. Cohen, J. Firestone, M. Pierobon, The Assurance Timeline: Building Assurance Cases for Synthetic Biology, International Workshop on Assurance Cases for Software-intensive Systems (ASSURE), to appear, September, pp. 75-86, 2016.
For more information on the publication for safety cases being applied to the biological domain go page here.
Here are some pertinent resources for developing safety cases:
Resources:
- Assurance Cases - http://www.sei.cmu.edu/dependability/tools/assurancecase/index.cfm
- Assurance Plans - http://www.sei.cmu.edu/dependability/tools/assurancecase/assurancecaseprep.cfm
- GSN - http://www.goalstructuringnotation.info/documents/GSN_Standard.pdf
- Gliffy - http://www.gliffy.com an online software to develop diagrams