Analysing failure behaviours in component interaction

In order to facilitate the process of safety analysis of an evolving software system, this paper presents an architectural approach that enhances the safety analysis by providing appropriate abstractions for modelling and analysing interactions between components, since faulty interactions are the usual cause of accidents. For that, instead of considering components as the locus of change, the proposed approach assumes that components remain unchanged while their interactions (captured by connectors) adapt to the different changes made in the system. The behavioural description of connectors is provided in terms of maintained time automata, and the safety analysis is performed using model checking, which verifies whether safe behaviour is maintained when interactions between components change. The feasibility of the approach is demonstrated in terms of a case study that deals with the safety procedures associated with the launching of a sounding rocket.

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