The integration of various technologies, including computer and electronics, makes the nowadays designed systems increasingly complex. They have behaviors which are more elaborate and difficult to predict, they have a greater number of components in interaction and/or perform highest level functions. Parallel to this increasing complexity of these systems, the competitive of the global market imposes strong constraints of cost and time to the system developers. Other strong constraints deal with the quality of these systems, especially when they involve human risks or significant financial risks. Thus, developers are forced to adopt a rigorous design approach to meet the desired system requirements and satisfy the various constraints (cost, time, quality, dependability...). Several methodological approaches to guide the system design are defined through system engineering standards. Our work is based on the EIA-632 standard, which is widely used, especially in the aeronautical and military fields. It is to improve the systems engineering process described by the EIA-632, in order to incorporate a global and explicit consideration of dependability. Indeed, till now the dependability was achieved by reusing generic models after having studied and developed independently each function. So there was no specific consideration of the risks associated with the integration of several technologies. For this reason, we propose to concern ourselves with the dependability requirements at the global level and as early as possible in the development phase. Then, these requirements will be decline to lower levels. We based our approach on the processes of the EIA-632 standard that we expand. We also propose an original method for the declination of the dependability requirements based on fault trees and FMEAC, and an information model based on SysML in order to support our approach. An example from the aeronautical field illustrates our proposals.
