Safety analysis of software product lines using state-based modeling

The difficulty of managing variations and their potential interactions across an entire product line currently hinders safety analysis in safety-critical, software product lines. The work described here contributes to a solution by integrating product-line safety analysis with model-based development. This approach provides a structured way to construct state-based models of a product line having significant, safety-related variations and to systematically explore the relationships between behavioral variations and potential hazardous states through scenario-guided executions of the state model over the variations. The paper uses a product line of safety-critical medical devices to demonstrate and evaluate the technique and results.