SOPHIA: a Modeling Language for Model-Based Safety Engineering

Development of increasingly more sophisticated safety-critical embedded systems requires new paradigms, since manual approaches are reaching their limits. Experiences have shown that model-driven engineering is an approach that can overcome many of these limitations. Using model-based approaches however lead to new challenges regarding the cohesive integration of both safety engineering and system design along the system development process. In this paper, we present SOPHIA, a modelling language that formalizes safety-related concepts and their relations with system modelling constructs. We particularly focus on accident models and on how to achieve confidence that the frequency of possible accidents will be tolerable. In addition, we explore some strategies to implement SOPHIA as a complementary modelling language to SysML and reuse some useful constructs form the UML MARTE profile.