Software safety : a definition and some preliminary thoughts

Software safety is the subject of a research project in its initial stages at the University of California Irvine. This research deals with critical real-time software where the cost of an error is high, e.g. human life. In this paper software techniques having a bearing on safety are described and evaluated. Initial definitions of software safety concepts are presented along with some preliminary thoughts and research questions

Building safe software

Murphy is a set of techniques and tools under investigation for their potential in enhancing the safety of software. This paper describes some of the work which has been done and some which is planned

An evaluation of software fault tolerance techniques in real-time safety-critical applications

The usefulness of three software fault tolerance techniques -- n-version programming, recovery blocks, and exception handling is examined within the context of real-time safety-critical environments. The general requirements of such application systems are presented and the techniques evaluated with regard to how well they satisfy these requirements

Completeness, robustness, and safety in real-time software requirements specification

This paper presents an approach to providing a rigorous basis for ascertaining whether or not a given set of software requirements is internally complete, i.e., closed with respect to questions and inferences that can be made on the basis of information included in the specification. Emphasis is placed on aspects of software requirements specifications that previously have not been adequately handled, including timing abstractions, safety, and robustness

Analyzing safety and fault tolerance using time Petri nets

The application of time Petri net modelling and analysis techniques to safety-critical real-time systems is explored and procedures described which allow analysis of safety, recoverability, and fault tolerance. These procedures can be used to help determine software requirements, to guide the use of fault detection and recovery procedures, to determine conditions which require immediate miti gating action to prevent accidents, etc. Thus it is possible to establish important properties duing the synthesis of the system and software design instead of using guesswork and costly a posteriori analysis

Bion-M2 PI 1-Pagers

No abstract availabl

System Theoretic Safety Analysis of the Sewol-Ho Ferry Accident in South Korea

This paper is to show the application of CAST, Causal Analysis based on STAMP (Systems Theoretic Accident Model and Processes) accident analysis tool to investigate the Sewol‐Ho Ferry Accident at the entire maritime transportation sociotechnological system level and to provide the system level safety improvements to the system safety control structure; to show that CAST is an accident analysis tool to effectively and holistically analyze the entire maritime transportation sociotechnological system level disaster; and to show that CAST can provide preventive solutions in a holistic view of top‐down system safety engineering

Safety verification of ADA programs in MURPHY

MURPHY is a experimental methodology, which will include an integrated tool set, for building safety-critical, real-time software. Although it is language independent, many safety-critical software projects are currently planning to use Ada. This paper presents the semantic templates for the verification of the safety of Ada programs using Software Fault Tree Analysis. An example is shown of applying the technique to an Ada program, and the tools in the MURPHY tool set to aid in this type of analysis are described

Software fault tree analysis tool user's manual

The Software Fault Tree Analysis Tool allows the user to interactively modify the graphic representation of a fault tree. This manual describes the user interface of the tool. The tool is currently available only for Sun-2 workstations running 4.2 BSD Unix

Improving the Standard Risk Matrix using STPA

This paper first discusses the limitations of the standard risk matrix. It then suggests some changes to the risk matrix and its use to improve the accuracy of the results