Improving Safety-Critical Systems by Visual Analysis

The importance analysis provides a means of analyzing the contribution of potential low-level system failures to identify and assess vulnerabilities of safety-critical systems. Common approaches attempt to enhance the system safety by addressing vulnerabilities using an iterative analysis process, while considering relevant constraints, e.g., cost, for optimizing the improvements. Typically, data regarding the analysis process is presented across several views with few interactive associations among them. Consequently, this hampers the identification of meaningful information supporting the decision making process. In this paper, we propose a visualization system that visually supports engineers in identifying proper solutions. The visualization integrates a decision tree with a plot representing the cause-effect relationship between the improvement ideas of vulnerabilities and the resulting risk reduction of system. Associating a component fault tree view with the plot allows to maintain helpful context information. The introduced visualization approach enables system and safety engineers to identify and analyze optimal solutions facilitating the improvement of the overall system safety. 1998 ACM Subject Classification B.4.5 Reliability, Testing, and Fault-Tolerance, I.3.8 Applications, D.2.4 Software/Program Verification