SafetyMet: A metamodel for safety standards

Abstract

In domains such as automotive, avionics, and railway, critical systems must comply with safety standards to allow their operation in a given context. Safety compliance can be an extremely demanding activity as practitioners have to show fulfilment of the safety criteria specified in the standards and thus that a system can be deemed safe. This is usually both costly and time consuming, and becomes even more challenging when, for instance, a system changes or aims to be reused in another project or domain. This paper presents SafetyMet, a metamodel for safety standards targeted at facilitating safety compliance. The metamodel consists of entities and relationships that abstract concepts common to different safety standards from different domains. Its use can help practitioners to show how they have followed the recommendations of a standard, and particularly in evolutionary or cross-domain scenarios. We discuss the benefits of the use of the metamodel, its limitations, and open issues in order to clearly present the aspects of safety compliance that are facilitated and those that are not addressed. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.