The increase of aerospace systems' complexity has meant that by using existing methods for systems development, industry has reached a barrier to innovation and a risk to the competitiveness of products. This is characterised by an increasing time to market for new technologies, increasing costs to demonstrate proof of safety, a greater demand for skilled resources and a limitation on design iterations, which means there is less time to optimise designs that are compliant with safety targets. MISSA aimed at filling this gap and providing methods and infrastructure that accelerate the convergence toward optimal system architecture that integrate safety constrains.

To reach this goal, MISSA focused on four main enabling contributions that are naturally linked together in the design process:

• In the very preliminary design phases, when aircraft functions have been allocated to systems, MISSA first provided methods and tools that support design and installation optimisation;
• Secondly, MISSA supported the accurate definition and assessment of a systems organic architecture against the safety requirements resulting from the early design phases;
• Thirdly, MISSA provided means for dealing with detailed system architecture and design;
• Finally, MISSA developed a software infrastructure that facilitates the exchange of information needed to achieve the above three points.

Thus MISSA developed methods and tools to help safety engineers to collect, navigate, and manage information, structure their arguments, express their ideas, and most importantly find solutions to problems in an efficient, auditable and exhaustive way.