Abstract
Modern safety-critical systems are increasingly reliant on software. Software safety is an important aspect in developing safety-critical systems, and it must be considered in the context of the system level into which the software will be embedded. STPA (System-Theoretic Process Analysis) is a modern safety analysis approach which aims to identify the potential hazardous causes in complex safety-critical systems at the system level. To assure that these hazardous causes of an unsafe software’s behaviour cannot happen, safety verification involves demonstrating whether the software fulfills those safety requirements and will not result in a hazardous state. We propose a method for verifying of software safety requirements which are derived at the system level to provide evidence that the hazardous causes cannot occur (or reduce the associated risk to a low acceptable level). We applied the method to a cruise control prototype to show the feasibility of the proposed method.
Access provided by Autonomous University of Puebla. Download to read the full chapter text
Chapter PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
Keywords
References
Leveson, N.G.: Safeware: System Safety and Computers. ACM, New York (1995)
McDermid, J.A.: Issues in developing software for safety critical systems. Reliability Engineering & System Safety 32, 1–24 (1991)
Leveson, N.G., Turner, C.S.: An investigation of the Therac-25 accidents. Computer 26(7), 18–41 (1993)
Lions, J.L.: ARIANE 5: Flight 501 Failure. Technical Report, Inquiry Board (1996)
Leveson, N.G.: Engineering a Safer World: Systems Thinking Applied to Safety. Engineering systems. MIT Press (2011)
Leveson, N.G.: An STPA Primer. Engineering systems. MIT Press (2013)
Leveson, N.G., Cha, S.S., Shimeall, T.J.: Safety verification of Ada Programs Using Software Fault Trees. IEEE Software 8(4), 48–59 (1991)
ATSB Transport safety Investigation Report, In-Flight Upset Event 240 km North-West of Perth, WA Boeing Company 777-200, 9M-MRG (2005)
Pnueli, A.: The temporal logic of programs. In: 18th Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science, pp. 46–57 (1977)
Ammann, P.E., Black, P.E., Majurski, W.: Using Model Checking to Generate Tests from Specifications. In: Proceedings of the Second IEEE International Conference on Formal Engineering Methods, ICFEM 1998 (1998)
Abdulkhaleq, A., Wagner, S.: Experiences with Applying STPA to Software-Intensive Systems in the Automotive Domain. In: Proc. 2013 STAMP Conference, MIT, USA (2013)
Abdulkhaleq, A., Wagner, S.: An Open Tool Support for System-Theoretic Process Analysis. In: Proc. 2014 STAMP Conference, MIT, USA (2014)
Friedemann, B.: Classification of Safety Requirements for Formal Verification of Software Models of Industrial Automation Systems. In: Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Software and Systems Engineering and their Applications, ICSSEA 2000 (2000)
McMillan, K.L.: Symbolic Model Checking. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Norwell (1992)
Hansen, K.M., Ravn, A.P., Stavridou, V.: From safety analysis to software requirements. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering 24(7), 573–584 (1998)
Tracey, N., Clark, J., McDermid, J., Mander, K.: Integrating Safety Analysis with Automatic Test-Data Generation for Software Safety Verification. In: Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on System Safety (1999)
Black, P.E.: Test Generation Using Model Checking and Specification Mutation. IT Professional 16(2), 17–21 (2014)
Stringfellow, M.V., Leveson, N.G., Owens, B.D.: Safety-Driven Design for Software-Intensive Aerospace and Automotive Systems. Proceedings of the IEEE 98(4), 515–525 (2010)
Ishimatsu, T., Leveson, N.G., Thomas, J.P., Fleming, C.H., Katahira, M., Miyamoto, Y., Ujiie, R., Nakao, H., Hoshino, N.: Hazard Analysis of Complex Spacecraft Using Systems-Theoretic Process Analysis. Journal of Spacecraft and Rockets 51(2) (2014)
Hardy, T.L.: Essential Questions in System Safety: A Guide for Safety Decision Makers. AuthorHouse (2010)
Lutz, R., Nikora, A.: Failure Assessment in System Health Management with Aerospace Applications, 1st edn. John Wiley & Sons (2011), Johnson, S.B., et al (eds.)
Brock, B.C., Hunt, W.A.: Formally Specifying and Mechanically Verifying Programs for the Motorola Complex Arithmetic Processor DSP. In: Proceedings of the 1997 IEEE International Conference on Computer Design: VLSI in Computers and Processors, ICCD 1997, October 12-15, pp. 31–36 (1997)
Kapur, R.: CTL for Test Information of Digital ICS. Springer (2002)
NASA.: Software Safety, NASA Technical Standard, NASA-STD 8719.13A (1997)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this paper
Cite this paper
Abdulkhaleq, A., Wagner, S. (2014). A Software Safety Verification Method Based on System-Theoretic Process Analysis. In: Bondavalli, A., Ceccarelli, A., Ortmeier, F. (eds) Computer Safety, Reliability, and Security. SAFECOMP 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8696. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-10557-4_44
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-10557-4_44
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-10556-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-10557-4
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)