Modeling System Safety Requirements Using Input/Output Constraint Meta-Automata

TL;DR

This paper introduces a formal framework using input/output constraint meta-automata to model and automatically ensure safety requirements in complex systems, enhancing safety validation beyond traditional model checking methods.

Contribution

It presents a novel meta-automata-based approach that separates safety modeling from system design, enabling automatic composition of safe systems according to specified safety constraints.

Findings

Formal modeling of safety requirements achieved

Automatic system safety assurance demonstrated

Distinct separation of safety and product engineering tasks

Abstract

Most recent software related accidents have been system accidents. To validate the absence of system hazards concerning dysfunctional interactions, industrials call for approaches of modeling system safety requirements and interaction constraints among components and with environments (e.g., between humans and machines). This paper proposes a framework based on input/output constraint meta-automata, which restricts system behavior at the meta level. This approach can formally model safe interactions between a system and its environment or among its components. This framework differs from the framework of the traditional model checking. It explicitly separates the tasks of product engineers and safety engineers, and provides a top-down technique for modeling a system with safety constraints, and for automatically composing a safe system that conforms to safety requirements. The contributions of this work include formalizing system safety requirements and a way of automatically ensuring system safety.