From Signal to Evidence: Establishing the Evidentiary Threshold for System Reliance

This paper examines a structural limitation present across safety-critical systems: the absence of a mechanism to evidence system condition at the moment of reliance.Current safety frameworks rely on certification, inspection, and maintenance processes to demonstrate compliance at defined points in time. These mechanisms establish that systems have met required standards, but they do not provide contemporaneous evidence of operational condition when those systems are depended upon.Through a cross-domain comparison, this paper analyses aviation data recording systems as a reference model for continuous evidencing. Aviation systems capture time-stamped operational data, enabling the reconstruction of system…