Modular safety assurance

Abstract

Most embedded systems in the automotive, avionics, or automation domains are safety-critical systems which are subject to strict safety standards and regulatory guidelines which govern the development process. These standards and guidelines require a tight integration between the development process and safety assurance. In modular engineering approaches such as the SPES XT modeling framework in particular, this means that safety assurance must be modular and enable developers to reuse partial safety results in different phases or between developments. However, without the support of sophisticated methods and tools, this approach is very tedious, error-prone, and costly. In this chapter, we introduce the SPES XT modeling framework's support for "modular safety assurance. We first introduce the challenges that arise from the modularization of safety assurance and present the Open Safety Model, which provides the modularity and the compositional properties needed in order to achieve modular safety assurance within the SPES XT modeling framework. We also present methodological building blocks which support modular safety assurance during specific phases of development.