Leveraging Traceability to Integrate Safety Analysis Artifacts into the Software Development Process

TL;DR

This paper introduces traceability techniques to better integrate safety analysis artifacts into the software development process, enhancing safety assessment and impact analysis for safety-critical systems.

Contribution

It proposes new traceability methods linking safety artifacts with system development artifacts, improving safety analysis maintenance and stakeholder understanding during system evolution.

Findings

Traceability links facilitate impact analysis of system changes on safety.

Visualization of change impact improves safety stakeholder decision-making.

Application to UAV emergency response demonstrates approach viability.

Abstract

Safety-critical system's failure or malfunction can cause loss of human lives or damage to the physical environment; therefore, continuous safety assessment is crucial for such systems. In many domains this includes the use of Safety assurance cases (SACs) as a structured argument that the system is safe for use. SACs can be challenging to maintain during system evolution due to the disconnect between the safety analysis and system development process. Further, safety analysts often lack domain knowledge and tool support to evaluate the SAC. We propose a solution that leverages software traceability to connect relevant system artifacts to safety analysis models, and then uses these connections to visualize the change. We elicit design rationales for system changes to help safety stakeholders analyze the impact of system changes on safety. We present new traceability techniques for closer integration of the safety analysis and system development process, and illustrate the viability of our approach using examples from a cyber-physical system that deploys Unmanned Aerial Vehicles for emergency response.