Designing critical systems with iterative automated safety analysis

Abstract

Safety analysis is an important aspect in Safety-Critical Systems Engineering (SCSE) to discover design problems that can potentially lead to hazards and eventually, accidents. Performing safety analysis requires significant manual effort --- its automation has become the research focus in the critical system domain due to the increasing complexity of systems and emergence of open adaptive systems. In this paper, we present a methodology, in which automated safety analysis drives the design of safety-critical systems. We discuss our approach with its tool support and evaluate its applicability. We briefly discuss how our approach fits into current practice of SCSE.