A Proposal for Model-Based Safety Analysis

Abstract

System safety analysis techniques are well es-tablished and are used extensively during the design of safety-critical systems. Despite this, most of the techniques are highly subjective and dependent on the skill of the practitioner. Since these analyses are usually based on an informal system model, it is unlikely that they will be complete, consistent, and error free. In fact, the lack of precise models of the system architecture and its failure modes often forces the safety analysts to devote much of their effort to finding undocumented details of the sys-tem behavior and embedding this information in the safety artifacts such as the fault trees.

In this paper we propose an approach, Model-Based Safety Analysis, in which the system and safety engineers use the same system models cre-ated during a model-based development process. By extending the system model with a fault model as well as relevant portions of the physical system to be controlled, automated support can be provided for much of the safety analysis. We believe that by using a common model for both system and safety engineering and automating parts of the safety analysis, we can both reduce the cost and improve the quality of the safety analysis. Here we present our vision of model-based safety analysis and dis-cuss the advantages and challenges in making this approach practical.