Component-based hazard analysis: Optimal designs, product lines, and online-reconfiguration

Abstract

Software plays an important role in the safety of today's systems and is increasingly used to create system with variants in form of product families or systems with online-reconfiguration in a cost-efficient manner. Therefore, the required hazard analysis has to consider not only a concrete system and its embedded software but also the different software configurations. We present several extensions to an existing component-based hazard analysis approach. At first, our approach permits to identify the optimal design variant w.r.t. the probabilities of the considered hazard. As the number of variants in a product family is often enormous, our approach secondly supports the hazard analysis of a whole product family at once. The analysis identifies the variant or combination of variants with the worst hazard probability. Finally, we show that also the hazards of systems with online-reconfiguration can be analyzed using the presented approach. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.