A Model-Driven Engineering Approach to Support the Verification of Compliance to Safety Standards

Certification of safety-critical systems according to well-recognised standards is the norm in many industries where the failure of such systems can harm people or the environment. Certification bodies examine such systems, based on evidence that the system suppliers provide, to ensure that the relevant safety risks have been sufficiently mitigated. The evidence is aimed at satisfying the requirements of the standards used for certification, and naturally a key prerequisite for effective collection of evidence, is that the supplier be aware of these requirements and the evidence they require. This often proves to be a very challenging task because of the sheer size of the standards and the fact that the textual standards are amenable to subjective interpretation. In this paper, we propose an approach based on UML profiles and model-driven engineering. It addresses not only the above challenge but also enables the automated verification of compliance to standards based on evidence. Specifically, a profile is created, based on a conceptual model of a given standard, which provides a succinct and explicit interpretation of the underlying standard. The profile is augmented with constraints that help system suppliers with establishing a relationship between the concepts in the safety standard of interest and the concepts in the application domain. This in turn enables suppliers to demonstrate how their system development artifacts achieve compliance to the standard. We illustrate our approach by showing how the concepts in the domain of sub-sea control systems can be aligned with the evidence requirements in the IEC61508 standard, which is one of the most commonly used certification standard for control systems.

[1]  Hoyt Lougee,et al.  SOFTWARE CONSIDERATIONS IN AIRBORNE SYSTEMS AND EQUIPMENT CERTIFICATION , 2001 .

[2]  Klaus Pohl,et al.  Software Product Line Engineering , 2005 .

[3]  R. Bell,et al.  IEC 61508: functional safety of electrical/electronic/ programme electronic safety-related systems: overview , 1999 .

[4]  Mehrdad Sabetzadeh,et al.  Characterizing the Chain of Evidence for Software Safety Cases: A Conceptual Model Based on the IEC 61508 Standard , 2010, 2010 Third International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation.

[5]  Gregory Zoughbi,et al.  Modeling safety and airworthiness (RTCA DO-178B) information: conceptual model and UML profile , 2011, Software & Systems Modeling.

[6]  Robert Lewis Safety Case Development as an Information Modelling Problem , 2009, SSS.

[7]  Hardi Hungar,et al.  8 UML for Software Safety and Certification , 2007 .

[8]  Kirsten Berkenkötter,et al.  OCL-based validation of a railway domain profile , 2006, MoDELS'06.

[9]  Hardi Hungar,et al.  UML for Software Safety and Certification - Model-Based Development of Safety-Critical Software-Intensive Systems , 2007, Model-Based Engineering of Embedded Real-Time Systems.

[10]  Peter G. Bishop,et al.  A Methodology for Safety Case Development , 2000, SSS.

[11]  Tim Kelly,et al.  Arguing Safety - A Systematic Approach to Managing Safety Cases , 1998 .

[12]  Klaus Pohl,et al.  Software Product Line Engineering - Foundations, Principles, and Techniques , 2005 .

[13]  Yannis Tzitzikas OCL: Object Constraint Language , 2005 .

[14]  Ulrich Hannemann,et al.  Modeling the Railway Control Domain Rigorously with a UML 2.0 Profile , 2006, SAFECOMP.

[15]  Mehrdad Sabetzadeh,et al.  Using UML Profiles for Sector-Specific Tailoring of Safety Evidence Information , 2011, ER.

[16]  Yong Bai,et al.  Subsea Engineering Handbook , 2012 .

[17]  Trevor Cockram,et al.  Electronic Safety Cases: Challenges and Opportunities , 2003 .

[18]  Martyn Thomas,et al.  Software for Dependable Systems: Sufficient Evidence? , 2007 .

[19]  Craig Larman,et al.  Applying UML and Patterns: An Introduction to Object-Oriented Analysis and Design and Iterative Development (3rd Edition) , 1997 .