skip to main content
research-article

Integrated safety analysis of software-controlled critical systems

Published: 25 January 2010 Publication History

Abstract

Software for safety-critical systems must deal with the hazards identified by safety analysis in order to make the system safe, risk-free and fail-safe. Certain faults in critical systems can result in catastrophic consequences such as death, injury or environmental harm. The focus of this paper is an integrated approach to software safety analysis based on a combination of two existing fault removal techniques, and implementation of software safety in developing a small prototype safety-critical system. A comprehensive software safety analysis involving a combination of Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA) and Fault Tree Analysis (FTA) techniques is conducted on the software functions of the critical system to identify potentially hazardous software faults. A prototype safety-critical system - Railroad Crossing Control System (RCCS), incorporating a microcontroller and software to operate the train on a track circuit is described. We also briefly compare safety-specific and non-safety specific techniques at developing RCCS.

References

[1]
Robyn R. Lutz, "Software Engineering for Safety: a Roadmap", Proceedings of the Conference on The Future of Software Engineering, June 04-11, 2000, Limerick, Ireland, pp. 213--226
[2]
John C. Knight. "Safety Critical Systems: Challenges and Directions" Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), Orlando, Florida, 2002.
[3]
N.G. Leveson and C. S. Turner. An investigation of the Therac-25 accidents. IEEE Computer, 26(7): 18--41, March 1987.
[4]
James Gleick. The New York Times Magazine 1st December 1996.
[5]
Dale M. Gray. Frontier Status Report #203, 19 May 2000. www. asi.org
[6]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qantas_Flight_72
[7]
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4381840.stm
[8]
IEEE STD 1012, IEEE Standard for Software Verification and Validation Plans, The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Inc. USA,1986.
[9]
N. G. Leveson Safeware: System Safety and Computers. Addison-Wesley 1995.
[10]
Debra S. Herman, "Software Safety and Reliability Basics:", (ch.2), Software Safety and Reliability: Techniques, Approaches, and Standards of Key Industrial Sectors Wiley-IEEE Computer Society Press, 2000.
[11]
EN50128 Railway Applications: Software for Railway Protection and Control Systems. CENELEC.
[12]
DO-178B/ED-12B Software Considerations in Airborne Systems and Equipment Certification, RTCA, EUROCAE, December 1992.
[13]
IEEE Std. 610.12-1990, Standard Glossary of Software Engineering Terminology.
[14]
Alan C. Tribble et al. "Software Safety Analysis of a Flight Guidance System", Proceedings of the 21st Digital Avionics Systems Conference (DASC'02), Irvine, California, Oct. 27-31, 2002.

Cited By

View all
  • (2014)An AADL Model-Based Safety Analysis Method for Flight Control SoftwareProceedings of the 2014 International Conference on Computational Intelligence and Communication Networks10.1109/CICN.2014.240(1148-1152)Online publication date: 14-Nov-2014
  • (2011)Implementation Details and Safety Analysis of a Microcontroller-based SIL-4 Software VoterIEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics10.1109/TIE.2010.206247158:3(822-829)Online publication date: Mar-2011
  • (2011)A software safety test approach based on FTA and Bayesian networks2011 Prognostics and System Health Managment Confernece10.1109/PHM.2011.5939497(1-5)Online publication date: May-2011

Recommendations

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes
ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes  Volume 35, Issue 1
January 2010
88 pages
ISSN:0163-5948
DOI:10.1145/1668862
Issue’s Table of Contents

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 25 January 2010
Published in SIGSOFT Volume 35, Issue 1

Check for updates

Author Tags

  1. safety-critical systems
  2. software faults
  3. software safety
  4. software safety analysis

Qualifiers

  • Research-article

Contributors

Other Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

  • Downloads (Last 12 months)6
  • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0
Reflects downloads up to 15 Feb 2025

Other Metrics

Citations

Cited By

View all
  • (2014)An AADL Model-Based Safety Analysis Method for Flight Control SoftwareProceedings of the 2014 International Conference on Computational Intelligence and Communication Networks10.1109/CICN.2014.240(1148-1152)Online publication date: 14-Nov-2014
  • (2011)Implementation Details and Safety Analysis of a Microcontroller-based SIL-4 Software VoterIEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics10.1109/TIE.2010.206247158:3(822-829)Online publication date: Mar-2011
  • (2011)A software safety test approach based on FTA and Bayesian networks2011 Prognostics and System Health Managment Confernece10.1109/PHM.2011.5939497(1-5)Online publication date: May-2011

View Options

Login options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

PDF

eReader

View online with eReader.

eReader

Figures

Tables

Media

Share

Share

Share this Publication link

Share on social media