Towards the automated qualification of tool chain design

Abstract

The development of safety-critical embedded systems is supported by a number of development tools, which are increasingly integrated into automated tool chains. Safety standards require these tool chains to be qualified, which is costly and requires a large effort. To reduce cost and effort tool chains can be composed of pre-qualified tools and then themselves pre-qualified by identifying the parts of tool chain software that have an impact on safety more exactly. In this paper we propose the use of a modeling language to describe this tool chain composition. This allows us to reduce effort even further by automatically analyzing the tool chain model for safety issues. It also promises to reduce the effort and cost of later steps in the deployment of the tool chain by formalizing the communication of safety issues and automating the generation of code for tool chain software. © 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.