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In the last several years, technical advances and regulatory pressures have motivated the need for flexible, simple, and performance-based solutions for conducting development assurance in support of a system safety assessment process. Additionally, the affected design space for commercial vehicles has been growing beyond the conventional regulations for airplanes, rotorcraft, engines, and propellers, addressed by current Aerospace Recommended Practices (ARPs). This space is beginning to include commercial technologies such as unmanned aerial systems, multi-stage spacecraft systems, and road-able aircraft. These developing areas are each accompanied with their own development assurance expectations in support of their safety criteria. Concurrently, the industry and regulators are working to simplify guidance for system safety and development assurance, which has been foundational in the aircraft industry for decades.

Aerospace Recommended Practice (ARP) 4754 Revision A (ARP4754A), Guidelines for Development of Civil Aircraft and Systems [1], and ARP4761, Guidelines and Methods for Conducting the Safety Assessment Process on Civil Airborne Systems and Equipment [2], together describe a complex set of intertwining processes which comprehensively prioritize development activities for a product's systems based on their safety criticality. These processes work at specific levels of detail (aircraft and system) and interact with a set of processes at lower levels of detail (item) defined by Radio Technical Commission for Aeronautics (RTCA) standards. The aircraft and system development process (ARP4754A) supplies functions, requirements, and architectural definitions to the System Safety process (ARP4761), which in turn supplies Development Assurance Levels back to the development process and on to the RTCA processes.