Continuous Assessment of Designs and Re-use in Model-based Safety Analysis

To deliver complex functionalities in a cost effective manner, distributed manufacturing systems should ideally be based on standard interoperable components and be flexible and easily extensible. At the same time, systems must be demonstrably safe and reliable. In this paper, we argue that to balance these conflicting demands effective safety analysis techniques are required that partly automate and simplify off-line safety assessment. We outline a technique that automates the construction of fault trees and FMEAs and explain how this technique can be repeatedly applied in the course of the design life-cycle on functional and architectural models to enable continuous assessment of evolving designs. Finally, we discuss the issue of re-use of safety analyses and give examples of how such reuse simplifies the assessment. Copyright © 2005 IFAC