Reducing Re-verification Effort by Requirement-Based Change Management

Changes in parts of a safety critical system typically require the re-verification of the whole system design. In this paper we present a change management approach that contains the effects of a change within a region of the system. The approach guarantees to maintain the integrity of the system while performing changes. Our approach directly integrates verification and validation activities in the process. Furthermore, the propagation of changes is not based on the interfaces of the components and their interconnections, but exploits the knowledge of the behavior described by the requirements. This approach creates a much more precise set of affected system artifacts. In addition, we propose techniques to analyze the propagation of changes automatically based on formalized requirements and guide the selection of suitable compensation candidates.