Integrating variability and safety analysis models using commercial UML-based tools

Abstract

Software and System Product Lines (SSPL) are the state-of-the-art for systematically reusing a common set of core assets in the development of similar products in a product family. A large number of SSPL success stories have been published in the last decade and commercial tool support is also available. SSPLs promise to reduce cost, to shorten time-to-market for new features, and to increase product quality by systematically reusing core assets in the development of three or more systems. However, an open challenge is SSPL engineering for safety-relevant systems such as automotive, avionic, or industrial automation systems. Safety-relevant systems have to be developed, analyzed, and certified according to safety standards such as IEC 61508. These standards demand the application of safety analyses such as Fault Tree Analysis and Failure Mode and Effect Analysis. Starting the safety analysis of each product variant of a SSPL from scratch is complex and very time-consuming. However, there are only few convincing cases, where SSPL approaches have been followed in safety engineering. To pave the way for a broader adoption of SSPL approaches, this paper reports practical experiences with industrial-strength methods and tools along an adaptive cruise control SSPL. The paper demonstrates how commercial tools can be used (i) to analyze safety-related aspects already in the architectural design, (ii) to model the results as component integrated component fault trees (C2FT), and (iii) to systematically reuse C2FT in the safety analysis of a concrete product. The results of the case study show that C2FT (i) can be easily integrated into a feature-oriented development process of SSPL, (ii) facilitate early consideration of safety in domain engineering, and (iii) reduce effort and complexity of safety analyses in application engineering

Variability management in safety‐critical systems design and dependability analysis

“…Software Product Line Engineering (SPLE) and component‐based approaches provide the benefits of large‐scale reuse, contributing to reducing the time‐to‐market and costs and increasing the quality of components. For these benefits, SPLE approaches have been largely adopted by industry in the development of critical systems, especially in automotive and aerospace domains. In the same way as critical systems built upon conventional approaches, critical systems built upon an SPL approach have to consider guidance defined in safety standards/considerations, eg, automotive ISO 26262 and aerospace DO‐178C and SAE ARP 4754A.…”

“…Existing compositional techniques provide automated support for dependability engineering processes with seamless integration between system design and dependability analysis. Such integration contributes to a reduction in the complexity of dependability engineering activities and facilitates large‐scale reuse, as illustrated in industrial examples from automotive and aerospace domains . However, even when adopting SPL strategies, the reuse of dependability information can still be challenging.…”

Variability Management in Safety-Critical Software Product Line Engineering

“…Research on variability management in dependability assets is split into extensions of traditional safety analysis techniques, e.g., FTA and FMEA, to suite SPLE processes [5,12,26], and model-based techniques [7,20,21,32]. The most notable work in the first category is the extension of software FTA (SFTA) to address the impact of SPL variation on dependability analysis [5,12].…”

“…In their approach, HARA and component fault modeling is performed by annotating the UML model in the same way as DEPendable-SPLE approach. As part of Kaßmeyer et al approach, Domis et al [7] have extended Component Integrated Component Fault Trees (C 2 FT) technique with variation points and integrated it with UML via a profile into Enterprise Architect tool. Although Kaßmeyer et al [21] approach and its extension [7] also provides a good solution for variant management in functional safety; it is dependent upon specific commercial tools.…”

“…Due to the benefits of large-scale reuse, Software Product Line Engineering (SPLE) and component-based approaches have been largely adopted by the industry in the development of SCS, especially in automotive [7,32] and aerospace domains [8,14]. However, safety-critical systems developed upon an SPLE approach have to address guidance defined in safety standards, e.g., ISO 26262 [18] for automotive, DO-178C [31] and SAE ARP 4754A [10] for aerospace.…”