The Death of Static Safety
Why frozen compliance frameworks can’t protect a world that never stops changing.
Static safety was built for a world where systems stopped evolving once they left the factory. That world no longer exists. Vehicles now learn, adapt, and connect to everything around them, while the discipline of safety remains frozen, certifying conditions that no longer exist. The only way to keep them safe is to make safety move at the same speed as development. That means shifting from periodic validation to continuous assurance, from a frozen certification event to a living process that observes, predicts, and corrects.
Operational Assurance (OA) isn’t just another compliance layer. It’s the connective tissue between intent, execution, and evidence. It doesn’t ask, “Did we meet the standard?” but “Are we still behaving as designed?” It’s not an audit trail. It’s a pulse—a vital, real-time measurement of whether the system is still alive, trustworthy, and aligned with its original purpose.
Why Static Safety Fails
Static safety fails because it’s anchored to the wrong moment. Every HARA, FMEA, and FMEDA begins with a snapshot of the system’s risk landscape at a single Point in Time (PIT). That snapshot becomes the baseline for all downstream artifacts: the Functional Safety Concept, the Technical Safety Concept, the safety case. Once locked, it rarely reflects the system’s evolving reality.
This is the central flaw of “paper safety.” It delivers a safety case that is a liability waiting for the next over-the-air (OTA) update or supplier calibration to expose it.
Software doesn’t respect snapshots. A new calibration from a Tier-2, a supplier update, or a minor line of code can alter assumptions about controllability, severity, or exposure without triggering a re-analysis. Yet the original HARA remains untouched, the ASIL decomposition unchanged, the safety case still valid. Static frameworks assume the system’s risk profile is constant between audits, when in truth, it’s continuously diverging.
This is why static safety isn’t just rough around the edges, but failing at the core. It was designed for fixed-function hardware, not adaptive platforms. By anchoring safety to a PIT instead of a continuous thread of evidence, the industry has built a discipline that certifies the past rather than governs the present.
Static safety fails because it cannot evolve. Dynamic safety begins where that rigidity ends.
From Static to Dynamic Safety
Dynamic safety recognizes that assurance cannot be proven once. It must be proven continuously. Instead of relying on static artifacts that describe what was intended, it depends on live data that shows what is happening.
This shift doesn’t discard the foundations of safety engineering. It makes them live. The HARA still exists, but its risk assumptions are no longer frozen; they are recalculated continuously against live operational data. ASIL classifications become adaptive thresholds that respond to observed behavior, not just fixed labels defined at launch. FMEDAs stop being one-time spreadsheets and become streaming analytics that monitor failure modes as they emerge, not months later during an audit.
Dynamic safety transforms the safety case into a living model of assurance. It links every artifact, requirement, test, calibration, and operational event into a traceable thread that can be interrogated at any moment. This continuous evidence chain becomes the foundation of OA, allowing organizations to govern safety as a measurable, real-time property rather than a historical claim.
Software Chain of Record (SCoR)
The Software Chain of Record, or SCoR, is the connective system that gives dynamic safety its immutable memory. It provides the continuous thread of evidence linking design intent to operational behavior.
In traditional safety programs, traceability ends when validation is complete. SCoR extends it indefinitely. It doesn’t just log that a test passed; it immutably links the specific test case to the exact software version, the requirement it validated, and the engineer who approved it. When a change is made, SCoR records not just the new code but how that change affects the entire chain of evidence.
SCoR transforms safety from a documentation exercise into a dynamic ledger of assurance. It allows auditors, engineers, and operators to observe the state of safety in real time, supported by data rather than declarations. It becomes the proof mechanism for Operational Assurance, turning intent, execution, and evidence into a single, observable continuum.
The Role of OA in a Continuous Safety Loop
OA acts as the nerve center for the entire safety ecosystem. It transforms safety from a linear milestone into a continuous cycle of observation, verification, and correction.
In this loop, OA functions like a living sensor for system integrity. It continuously interrogates the SCoR, monitoring runtime behavior and detecting drift from expected parameters. When a deviation is detected—a change in code, a new calibration, or an unexpected runtime event—OA doesn’t wait for the next audit. It initiates analysis and correction in real time.
That immediate response closes the gap between detection and assurance, transforming safety from reactive documentation into proactive governance. This is what replaces the old question of “Who signed off?” with a better one: “What evidence do we have that the system remains within safe operating bounds?” Trust is no longer assumed; it is demonstrated.
When assurance becomes continuous, safety stops being a task and becomes a culture. It shifts from something teams prove after the fact to something the system demonstrates on its own. That cultural inflection point is where the future begins.
Evolving the Safety Mindset
Safety isn’t static, and neither is the world it protects. The moment systems began learning, communicating, and evolving, the logic of frozen safety certification became obsolete. What comes next isn’t another standard; it’s a philosophy shift. Safety must live, breathe, and prove itself in motion.
OA and the SCoR are the scaffolding for that shift. Together, they give organizations the ability to see safety as it happens, not as it was last documented. This real-time visibility defines the Point-in-Time Operational Assurance Level (PIT-OAL) — a living measure of system integrity that replaces static confidence with continuous evidence. It’s more than compliance transformation. It’s the foundation for trust in the Enteltran era, where energy, telecom, and transportation converge, and where system integrity defines the credibility of entire industries.
The leaders will treat assurance as strategy, not paperwork. The rest will be certifying their own obsolescence.
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Michael Entner-Gómez is a strategist, technologist, and writer focused on the convergence of the world’s most critical infrastructure sectors: energy, transportation, and telecommunications. Using a systems-thinking approach, he helps industry incumbents and disruptors future-proof their operations, scale complex platforms, and navigate the shift to software-defined everything.