Automating compositional safety analysis using a failure type taxonomy for component fault trees

Abstract

Safety assurance is a major challenge in the design of today's complex embedded systems and future Cyber-physical systems. Changes in a system's architectural design invalidate former safety analyses and require a manual adaptation of related safety analysis models in order to restore consistency. In this work, we present an approach for automating the compositional assembly of Component Fault Trees by automatically generating mappings between their input and output failure modes. Therefore, we propose a taxonomy of failure types for annotating model elements and deriving a model of the failure propagation. This way, automatic and system-wide safety analyses can be executed and easily repeated after making modifications to the system's architecture. We demonstrate the feasibility of our approach using an example ethylene vaporization unit from an industrial domain