Towards variability support for security and dependability patterns: a case study

Security and Dependability (S&D) have become mandatory requirements while engineering embedded systems in some industrial sectors. Typically, S&D requirements are developed ad-hoc for each system, preventing further reuse beyond domain-specific boundaries. In recent times, S&D patterns have been introduced to provide reusable solutions. Those patterns benefit from metamodels and tools based on Model-Driven Engineering. However, those patterns typically need to be slightly adapted in order to be integrated into the target embedded system. In this paper, we introduce the notion of systematic reuse of S&D patterns by means of a product-line infrastructure in order to foster the reuse while engineering S&D embedded systems. This way, the benefits of S&D patterns are spread since their reuse is automated. We illustrate our paper with a S&D voter pattern, which provides dependability properties, namely, reliability and availability. We use it in a railway control system case study with stringent dependability requirements.