QuantUM: Quantitative Safety Analysis of UML Models

TL;DR

QuantUM provides an automated approach for early safety assessment of UML architectural models, translating them into analysis models and presenting results within UML, thus making formal safety analysis accessible and integrated into standard development workflows.

Contribution

It introduces a method to perform quantitative safety analysis directly on UML models without requiring formal methods expertise.

Findings

Automated translation from UML to analysis models.

Analysis results are visualized within UML diagrams.

Validated with an industrial case study.

Abstract

When developing a safety-critical system it is essential to obtain an assessment of different design alternatives. In particular, an early safety assessment of the architectural design of a system is desirable. In spite of the plethora of available formal quantitative analysis methods it is still difficult for software and system architects to integrate these techniques into their every day work. This is mainly due to the lack of methods that can be directly applied to architecture level models, for instance given as UML diagrams. Also, it is necessary that the description methods used do not require a profound knowledge of formal methods. Our approach bridges this gap and improves the integration of quantitative safety analysis methods into the development process. All inputs of the analysis are specified at the level of a UML model. This model is then automatically translated into the analysis model, and the results of the analysis are consequently represented on the level of the UML model. Thus the analysis model and the formal methods used during the analysis are hidden from the user. We illustrate the usefulness of our approach using an industrial strength case study.