Towards model-driven safety analysis

Abstract

Model-based safety analysis allows very high quality analysis of safety requirements. Both qualitative (i.e. what must go wrong for a system failure) and quantitative aspects (i.e. how probable is a system failure) are of great interest for safety analysis. Traditionally, the analysis of these aspects requires separate, tool-dependent formal models. However, building adequate models for each analysis requires a lot of effort and expertise. Model-driven approaches support this by automating the generation of analysis models. SAML is a tool-independent modeling framework that allows for the construction of models with both non-deterministic and probabilistic behavior. SAML models can automatically be transformed into the input language of different state of the art formal analysis tools — while preserving the semantics — to analyze different aspects of safety. As a consequence both — qualitative and quantitative — model-based safety analysis can be done without any additional generation of models and with transferable results. This approach makes SAML an ideal intermediate language for a model-driven safety analysis approach. Every higher-level language that can be transformed into SAML can be analyzed with all targeted formal analysis tools. New analysis tools can be added and the user benefits from every advancement of the analysis tools.