A look at misuse cases for safety concerns

Abstract

Given the huge industrial take-up of UML, it has become less feasible to invent entirely new methods and modeling languages to address systems development challenges not covered by that language. Instead, the most fruitful way to go often seems to be to adapt UML to address such special challenges. In the security and safety domain, various such adaptations have been proposed. In this paper we look at misuse cases, originally proposed for security, with the purpose of investigating whether they are also useful for safety, and to what extent they can complement existing diagrammatic modeling techniques in the safety domain. Misuse cases is thus compared to several traditional techniques for safety analysis, such as fault trees, cause-consequence diagrams, HazOp, and FME(C)A, identifying strengths and weaknesses of either. © 2007 International Federation for Information Processing.