Implementing Best Practices For The Maintenance Of Safety Critical Systems

Safety critical systems need different treatment to develop and to maintain than non-safety critical systems.
A key reason being the impact of failure of a safety critical system can cause human loss.
With the multitude of best practices available for delivery of services the challenge is to select an appropriate set of best practices and to tailor them to satisfy the needs of the service.

Eurocontrol is a European organisation responsible for the safety of air navigation.
The Maastricht Upper Area Control Centre, managed by EUROCONTROL on behalf of four European States, provides air traffic control for the upper airspace (above 24,500 feet, or 7,500 metres) of Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and north-west Germany.

Eurocontrol has implemented a customised version of the Information Technology Information Library (ITIL) model as the basis of the Engineering division’s quality and safety management system for maintaining safety critical systems.

Munish Khurana
  is a leader of the team managing safety, quality, and IT security aspects of safety critical systems used for air traffic management at Maastricht Upper Area Centre in the Netherlands. He has over 15 years of experience covering Research and Development, Telecoms, Medical, Semi-Conductors, Electronics, Automotive, and Air Traffic Management industrial sectors.
Munish was a member of the SPICE project Trials team. He was the Quality and Process Manager of a CMM level 5 company in the telecoms sector that went through a rapid growth in the telecoms boom in the nineties.
In his current role as team leader at the Maastricht centre of Eurocontrol, he is responsible for managing risks associated with changes made to safety critical systems. Risk management is carried out by following a quality management system built using ITIL, IEC 61508, ISO9001, and ISO 17799, amongst other regulatory standards.
In addition, he is the project manager of the Unit Safety Case project, where the aim is to create a quantitative model to identify and manage safety risks associated with delivering air traffic management service.