Software Approach to Hazard Detection Using On-line Analysis of Safety Constraints

Hazard situations in safety-critical systems are typically complex, so there is a need for means to detect complex hazards and react in a timely and meaningful way. This paper addresses the problem of hazard detection through the development of an on-line analysis tool. The approach allows the user to specify complex multi-source hazards using a query-like language, uses both synchronous and asynchronous on-line checking approaches to balance efficiency and expressiveness, accommodates dynamic applications through dynamic constraint addition, and supports distributed and parallel applications running in heterogeneous environments.