Therefore, any critical-safety system can employ the proposed method to identify the most
effective safety measures as well as to determine the relations among RE and safety measures.
Nevertheless, the number of the process units under study is small and it is the first limitation
of this research. Therefore, it is suggested for future researches that investigators employ the
large number categories of their data for analysis as they can verify and validate their model in
large scale. Another limitation of this paper in terms of scope is that it looks for the application
of RE principles only in the items encompassed by the proposed method. Of course, this implies
limited flexibility because RE principles might be applied in other dimensions of the
organization that are not encompassed by this study (e.g. product design). Also, the last
limitation of this research is the need for both company examiners and representatives to know
about RE, a difficulty which could be tackled by training mechanisms (e.g. manuals with
examples of appropriate practices), with a view in order to making the assessment process
uniform. In fact, since RE is not yet a fully established discipline, as well as assuming that it is
not being widely disseminated in the industry, it can be taken into account that there is not even a
sufficient base of knowledge in the literature for establishing prescriptive requirements.