Software Safety Demonstration and Idemnification
Odell Hegna

TL;DR
This paper introduces a statistical, risk-based approach for verifying safety-critical software, aligning software safety assurance with hardware practices through demonstration and indemnification techniques.
Contribution
It develops a quantitative, risk-based product assurance method for safety-critical software, resolving conflicts in the definition of risk within safety standards.
Findings
Demonstration generates random tests for software validation.
Indemnification converts test results into statistical parameters.
The approach achieves high confidence in software safety compliance.
Abstract
Computers may control safety-critical operations in machines having embedded software. This memoir proposes a regimen to verify such algorithms at prescribed levels of statistical confidence. The United States Department of Defense standard for system safety engineering (MIL-STD-882E) defines development procedures for safety-critical systems. However, a problem exists: the Standard fails to distinguish quantitative product assurance technique from categorical process assurance method for software development. Resulting is conflict in the technical definition of the term risk. The primary goal here is to show that a quantitative risk-based product assurance method exists and is consistent with hardware practice. Discussion appears in two major parts: theory, which shows the relationship between automata and software; and application, which covers demonstration and indemnification.…
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Taxonomy
TopicsSoftware Reliability and Analysis Research · Safety Systems Engineering in Autonomy · Software Testing and Debugging Techniques
