From first draft to continuing review
Build the argument.
Understand its limits.
This guide explains the Energy edition workflow. It is software guidance for competent teams, not a safety engineering method, operating procedure or determination of legal compliance.
1. Prepare the people and scope
Your platform administrator allocates Safety Case to the company under Sentinel Suite → Safety Case — Energy. The company needs an active annual Sentinel licence for authoring. The current edition gives company managers access to case records and shared barriers; ordinary member access is not enabled. At least two appropriate people are needed for authoring and independent issue.
The assigned reviewer must be a company manager who has not contributed to the current revision. A platform administrator does not bypass this independence check. Assign accounts and company roles through the existing Sentinel administration process.
2. Open the workspace
Use the Safety & Assurance Case link alongside the suite’s module buttons, or open the Safety Case Workspace page. Select your company. No assessment must be open first. Use the company selector carefully: records are isolated by company and remain protected by authenticated access.
3. Register shared barriers
Choose Shared barriers → New shared barrier. Give the physical or organisational control a unique equipment or barrier reference. Record its safety function, responsible owner, measurable performance standard, condition, verification dates, evidence reference, dependencies and limitations.
Use Unknown where performance has not been established. Marking a barrier Available requires the supporting fields; it remains a human-recorded assessment. One registered barrier may support several cases. Use Show dependent cases before proposing a change. This is dependency tracing, not a quantitative risk simulation.
4. Create a draft
Choose Assurance cases → New case, or Create fictional energy draft for training. The example begins with unassessed claims and no approval. Label any training case clearly and keep it separate from operational records.
Define the facility, system, lifecycle stage, scope and interfaces. Establish the operating envelope using controlled engineering documents. Record the hazard set, applicable requirements and editions, overall argument, assumptions, limitations, risk-reduction reasoning and emergency arrangements. Assign an owner, review date and independent reviewer.
5. Build the claims
Add a unique claim ID such as C1. A parent ID indicates the claim it supports. The application rejects duplicate IDs, missing parents and cyclic parent relationships. Explain the argument: evidence alone does not say why the claim follows.
Record contrary evidence in the Challenge field. Record its disposition and the reasoning in Resolution; do not simply delete inconvenient evidence. Supported means the author’s proposed conclusion, still subject to independent review. Completeness checks cannot judge the engineering quality of the conclusion.
6. Attach and reference evidence
Save the draft first. Drop supported files into Original evidence or use Upload evidence. PDF, Word, Apple Pages and common image formats are supported subject to file validation. Export Google Docs as Word or PDF and convert unsupported photo formats before uploading. Limits are 5 MB per file and 50 MB / 100 files per case.
Original bytes are retained with SHA-256 fingerprints. Revised documents are uploaded as new attachments, leaving earlier evidence intact. The module does not provide malware scanning; use your organisation’s approved document-handling process. The interface does not translate or rewrite original evidence.
Edit the draft again and select the files supporting each claim. Select shared barriers and source assessments at case level before linking them to claims. Record the specific finding, action, barrier or evidence ID from the source assessment in the claim argument.
7. Connect the wider suite
Assessment links record the source title, revision and content fingerprint. They do not import the complete assessment or extend permission to read it. The independent reviewer must have access to source assessments when issuing. A subsequent assessment change is conservatively flagged even if it affects a different part of that assessment.
Use Incident and Investigate/Pro for events and findings, Bowtie for pathways and controls, and Assure for verification. Reference Change, Compliance and Audit decisions where relevant. Standalone Observe and Competence registers retain separate permissions: attach an authorised copy or controlled reference rather than assuming a live automatic connection.
Saving an edited draft acknowledges the currently selected dependency versions. Read the updated sources before saving; acknowledgement does not substitute for assessing their significance.
8. Submit and review
Check the readiness list. Missing narrative, unsupported claims, unresolved challenges, unavailable attachments, changed references, degraded barriers and overdue verification prevent progression. A case with no automated gaps is ready for human consideration, not proven safe.
Choose Submit for independent review and record a meaningful reason. The review state locks the draft and attachments. The assigned independent reviewer examines the sources, argument and limitations, then chooses Issue reviewed case or Return to draft with a reason. The author and every contributor to the revision are excluded from issuing it.
9. Retain the issued version
Issued versions are separate snapshots containing the case, reviewed barrier versions, source-reference versions, evidence manifest, reviewer identity and decision. They have no edit/delete API. A SHA-256 checksum is checked when retrieving an issue. This detects corruption but is not an independently anchored digital signature or proof against a privileged database administrator.
Open Issued versions to download the reviewed JSON or HTML report. Open the HTML report and use Print → Save as PDF. Working-record exports are labelled as working drafts. Original attachments are downloaded separately; neither JSON nor PDF embeds them. Preserve all required files and source assessments in your controlled records process.
10. Keep the case under review
Refresh the case after changes. Changed dependencies and overdue dates appear as review gaps without changing the old issued snapshot. Use Start next revision to prepare a new draft. Do not use the old issue as an automatic indication of current validity.
To stop using the current case, choose Withdraw current case and record the reason. Archival removes eligible records from the active list and retains their evidence and history. Issued cases must be withdrawn before archival. Archiving a shared barrier makes it unavailable to dependent cases.
Worked exercise: Northbank Energy
- Create the fictional energy draft and read all four unassessed claims.
- Create fictional barrier NB-DEMO-ISO-01. Keep its condition Unknown until you have added labelled fictional verification evidence.
- Link it to the isolation claim and save. Observe the readiness gaps.
- Add a training PDF, link it to the relevant claim and explain its limitations.
- Use two authorised training users to test submission and independent issue. Never mark the example as a real operational acceptance.
- Change the shared barrier to Degraded. Refresh the case and observe the dependency gap.
- Retrieve the old issue and confirm it remains unchanged. Start a new revision and document the required reassessment.
Release scope and operational checks
This edition supports energy case preparation and review. It does not provide quantitative risk aggregation, automatic ALARP determination, externally signed audit anchoring, full branch/merge, certificate-content parsing, automatic source-register transfers, desktop synchronisation, or sector certification.
Before operational reliance, validate the case structure and workflow with your competent energy specialists. Verify backups and recovery, permissions, host capacity, file handling, independent review and document retention for your deployment. Run a controlled pilot with representative records and retain acceptance results.