Automatically generated safety mechanisms from semi-formal software safety requirements

Abstract

Today's automobiles incorporate a great number of functions that are realized by software. An increasing number of safety-critical functions also follow this trend. For the development of such functions, the ISO 26262 demands a number of additional steps to be performed compared to common software engineering activities. We address some of these demands with means to semi-formally express software safety requirements, tools to automatically implement these requirements, and artifacts and traceability information that can be used for safety case documentation. Through a hierarchical classification of safety mechanisms, a semi-formal specification language for requirements, a generation engine and a case study on a production-model automotive system, we demonstrate: first, how expert knowledge of the functional safety domain can be captured, second, how the tedious and error prone task of manually implementing safety mechanisms can be automated, and third, how this serves as a basis for formal safety argumentation. © 2014 Springer International Publishing.