Dependability Assurance Framework for
Safety-Sensitive Consumer Devices
(Formerly known as the Consumer Device Safety Standard)

Unlike traditional industrial machineries, consumer devices are used in diverse, open, and dynamic environments. Furthermore, as accountability of manufacturing companies becomes crucial, they need to assure that their products are dependable whenever required during the development and operational phases. To satisfy these requirements, this paper proposes a process model of simultaneous development of embedded control software and dependability cases. In the process, control software and the dependability case are simultaneously refined and updated. These perspectives are created according to the experiences that Japan has provided highly safe and reliable products with the reasonable prices in the world. These will become more important than before because the complexity will be rapidly progressing such that consumer devices are connecting with the social network including information and energy systems. This paper gives an overview of our effort to standardize the functional safety of consumer devices, their development methodologies and how their dependability is assured.