ABSTRACT
Technology is an irreversible reality in amodernworld. The amount of technological artifacts that we have interface diary is very impressive so that is possible to say that we are living in a technology-dependent society. Despite anyphilosophical discussionswhether this is good or not, the reality imposes some concerns since the responsibilities being assigned to automated systems is growing more and more. In some cases, the operation of these systems has safety implications like in the airborne systems. Failures in these systems can lead to catastrophic consequences. In this context, the system architectures used in the aircrafts 30 years ago are quite different from now. Nowadays, the amount of functions being performed by electronic system and the level of integration between these functions create a challenge for the safety engineers in how to deal with this complexity. The use of new technologies brought up several advantages; however they brought also new kind of risks. Understand the nature of the complexity is a basic condition to deal with system safety aspects in this scenario. So the proposal of this paper is to discuss the complexity in the context of airborne systems and its implications on safety.
