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A Compositional Safety Specification Using a Contract-Based Design Methodology

Authors:
Markus Oertel
Peter Battram
Omar Kacimi
Sebastian Gerwinn
Achim Rettberg

Keywords: Safety Critical Systems, Safety Contracts, Contract-based Design, Model-based Design, Fault Modeling, Model Checking, Formal Methods

Abstract:
Model-based design methodologies have become the standard approach to develop safety critical systems. Therefore, many approaches exist to model faults, failures and their propagation. Nevertheless, due to the frequent use of off-the-shelf components as well as the need to react efficiently on changes, the importance of modular and compositional techniques is gaining constantly. Here, we present an approach for compositional reasoning on safety specifications that supports multiple abstraction levels in the design process. Especially in the safety domain, it is obvious that a safety concept is just valid under certain conditions, e.g. that only a limited amount of components may fail at the same time. Therefore, we extend existing safety specification methods based on contracts, which explicitly distinguish between assumptions and guarantees, building a well-founded framework for compositional reasoning. Our formalization method can be used to develop a safety specification starting from the top level system component and refine it until the lower hardware and software layers while preserving the validity of early performed analyzes. On a practical level, we further describe how safety specifications can be formalized into a model checking problem and analyzed using existing tools.

Pages: 1 to 7

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2015

Publication date: April 19, 2015

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2308-3700

ISBN: 978-1-61208-401-5

Location: Barcelona, Spain

Dates: from April 19, 2015 to April 24, 2015