Incident and accident investigation techniques to inform model-based design of safety-critical interactive systems

Abstract

The quality of the design of an interactive safety-critical system can be enhanced by embedding data and knowledge from past experiences. Traditionally, this involves applying scenarios, usability analysis, or the use of metrics for risk analysis. In this paper, we present an approach that uses the information from incident investigations to inform the development of safetycases that can, in turn, be used to inform a formal system model, represented using Petri nets and the ICO formalism. The foundations of the approach are first detailed and then exemplified using a fatal mining accident case study. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.