A Modeling Approach to Support Safety Assurance in the Automotive Domain

Abstract

As safety standards are widely used in safety-critical domains, such as ISO 26262 in the automotive domain, the use of safety cases to demonstrate product safety is stimulated. It is crucial to ensure that a safety case is both correct and clear. To support this, we proposed to make use of modeling techniques to support safety assurance in the automotive domain. Continuing on our previous work, a rule-based approach enables us to extract a conceptual model from safety standards or project guidelines. Then, by applying structured English using an SBVR vocabulary, the safety case is linked to the conceptual model, and the content of it is enforced to be well structured and controlled. The contribution of the explicit link between the safety case and the conceptual model is to reduce the ambiguity of natural language, and to increase the confidence in the claimed safety assurance. Finally, tooling is developed that enables syntax highlighting and content assistance while editing safety cases. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015.