Safety assessment methodology

SAM is a framework, a toolbox, containing methods and techniques to develop safety assessments of changes to functional systems.

SAM allows users to perform:

• FHA (identify hazards, assess their effects and the related severity);
• PSSA (fault tree analysis, event tree analysis, common cause analysis, etc.);
• SSA (documentation of the evidence, collecting data, test and validation, etc.);

SAM is organised in three levels:

• level 1 explains the "what";
• level 2 provides details on "how" to perform a safety assessment;
• level 3 provides real life examples from air navigation service providers and the industry;

SAM has an electronic version - e-SAM - that allows users to navigate through the various documents of the regulatory framework. It works on all MS-Windows platforms.

Although there have been many changes in the regulatory framework (successively EU 2096/2005 and CIR.1035/2011), SAM is still relevant for risk assessment and mitigation purposes.

For further information on how to build a safety case, read the 'safety case development manual”, which you can find in the tool itself.

Version 2.1 of SAM was released in 2006. At that time, the toolbox was recognised as an 'acceptable means of compliance (with limitations) to ESARR4' by the Safety Regulation Commission (SRC).