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Generation of hazard relation diagrams: formalization and tool support

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Abstract

Developing safety-critical, software-intensive embedded systems are characterized by the need to identify hazards and to define hazard-mitigating requirements at the earliest possible stage of development, i.e., during requirements engineering. These hazard-mitigating requirements must be adequate in the sense that they must specify the functionality required by the stakeholders in addition to rendering the system sufficiently safe during operation. The adequacy of hazard-mitigating requirements is determined during requirements validation. Yet, the validation of the adequacy of hazard-mitigating requirements is burdened by the fact that hazards and contextual information about hazards are a work product of safety assessment, and hazard-mitigating requirements are a work product of requirements engineering. These work products are poorly integrated such that during validation, the information needed to determine the adequacy of hazard-mitigating requirements is not available to stakeholders. In consequence, there is the risk that inadequate hazard-mitigating requirements remain covert and the system is falsely considered safe. To alleviate this issue, we have previously proposed (Tenbergen et al., in: Proceedings of the 21st international working conference on requirements engineering: foundation for software quality, pp 17–32, 2015), improved, and evaluated (Tenbergen et al. in Requir Eng J 23(2):291–329, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00766-017-0267-9) a novel diagram type called “Hazard Relation Diagrams.” In this paper, we present a semiautomated formal approach and tool support for their generation. We make use of a running example to illustrate the concepts.

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Notes

  1. A more adequate mitigation might consider the use of a redundant source for yaw rate and lateral acceleration, e.g., through an inertial measuring unit.

  2. Here and in the following, we use the operator \( x \in_{t} U \) to denote that some \( x \) is element of some tuple \( U \), regardless of its index within \( U \). Since the tuples in this research are unambiguous due to their membership order and type-specificity, the following holds as a simplification of [4]: \( \in_{t} : = \exists x|U = (u_{1} , u_{2} , \ldots , u_{n} ) \wedge x = u_{t} ,0 < t < n \).

  3. The tool prototype including the implementation of pseudo-code scripts is available at https://bit.ly/34mSGW0.

  4. The diagrams in this manuscript have been created using these tool prototypes. Their implementations along with documentation for installation and usage are available at http://goo.gl/MdxJie.

  5. For researchers interested in replicating our experiments, all experimental materials are available at https://goo.gl/XwJJQu.

  6. The experimental results can be found at https://goo.gl/XwJJQu.

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Acknowledgements

This research was partly funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research under Grant Number 01IS12005C. We would like to thank our colleagues André Heuer, Marian Daun, Kevin Keller, and Jonathan Baker for their assistance with implementation and rationale categorization.

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  1. Department of Computer Science, State University of New York at Oswego, Oswego, USA

    Bastian Tenbergen

  2. paluno – The Ruhr Institute for Software Technology, University of Duisburg-Essen, Essen, Germany

    Thorsten Weyer

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  1. Bastian Tenbergen
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Correspondence to Bastian Tenbergen.

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Tenbergen, B., Weyer, T. Generation of hazard relation diagrams: formalization and tool support. Softw Syst Model 20, 175–210 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10270-020-00799-1

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