SysRO

Today's technical systems are getting more and more complex associated with the rapid increase of new technologies in a number of industrial domains. These systems have one feature in common: the constantly increasing amount and complexity of software. And they have to be safe against humans and the environment. Ascertaining the safe behaviour of technical systems is key. Therefore, a number of safety regulations and standards have emerged just over the last decade. Consequently, there is a significant growth of the scope and the intensity of safety assessments of technical systems required to being compliant with these safety regulations and standards. However, this has also an impact on today's approach of performing safety assessments which are predominantly carried out 'manually', i.e. today's commercially available and cross-industry used safety analysis tools are no longer up to date to cope with the complexity of technical systems.

Regulations in aerospace demand to get off the traditional safety analysis way to a Model-Based Safety Analysis (MBSA) in order to minimize analysis errors as early as possible in the development phases of technical systems though the systems are getting constantly more complex. Model-based safety analysis has the benefits of identifying failure scenarios in a repetitive manner prior to the detailed de-sign of technical systems and allows an automated execution of the required safety assessments, hence, further reducing potential “human errors” when analysing systems safety. Other industries have already started to follow the aerospace approach.

In order to compete with the increasing complexity of technical systems in combination with the faster time-to-market demands guaranteeing the required level of safety, a framework for a requirements-driven optimization of the system concepts in conjunction with a Model-Based Safety Analysis (MBSA) respectively Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) is proposed for this research project. This can be achieved by integrating MBSA into the MBSE based development of the system concepts. The Unique Selling Proposition is an automated MBSA by 'automating' the safety analysis methods demanded by the relevant safety regulations/standards. This will help substantially reducing safety-engineering time in system development at a substantially higher level of reliability of the assessment results.

By automating the generation of safety analysis deliverables, the results of the research project will enable the industrial partners to identify earlier in the preliminary concept phase the critical and in many cases safety-related de-sign aspects of complex technical systems. Moreover, moving towards the direction of a consequent model-based system design including automated analysis of possible system failures will help system developers to identify mis-matches versus system requirements and system architecture and therefore system design as early as possible in the development cycle. It will optimize effort and costs by reducing or even avoiding design rework. It will help to overcome current practices in system development of industrial companies.