Co-Evolution of Software Architecture and Fault Tree models: An Explorative Case Study on a Pick and Place Factory Automation System

Safety-critical systems are subject to rigorous safety analyses, e.g., hazard analyses. Fault trees are a deductive technique to derive the combination of faults which cause a hazard. There is a tight relationship between fault trees and system architecture as the components contain the faults and the component structure influences the fault combinations. In this paper, we describe an explorative case study on multiple evolution scenarios of a factory automation system. We report on the evolution steps on the system architecture models and fault trees and how the evolution steps in the different models relate to each other.