Automatic Generation of UML Profiles for Representing Safety Standards

Assessing and certifying the functional safety of the software of critical systems is of paramount importance, since any failure might produce significant costs as well as harm to people. Some common examples of critical systems are transport vehicles (trains, airplanes, cars…), medical devices, and critical infrastructures (nuclear plants, oil platforms…). Safety certification intends to reduce the risk of failure to an acceptable level in compliance with standards. IEC 61508 is a reference safety standard whose use is specialized in some domains, such ISO 26262 for automotive and EN 50128 for railway. For applying these standards, the use of Model-Driven approaches based on UML Profiles is a suitable alternative. However, UML profiles are usually manually defined, which is a highly time-consuming task and error-prone. In addition, manually defined UML profiles are difficult to validate in relation to the reference standards and to the coverage of safety concepts. This paper presents the adaptation of an existing approach for automatic UML Profile generation to support the generation of UML Profiles for safety specifications that are based on IEC 61508. As a result, it is possible to reduce the time and errors that are common in a manual specification of safety UML Profiles.