Asim Abdulkhaleq

Asim Abdulkhaleq, Stefan Wagner

Software safety is a crucial aspect during the development of modern safety-critical systems. Software is becoming responsible for most of the critical functions of systems. Therefore, the software components in the systems need to be tested extensively against their safety requirements to ensure a high level of system safety. However, performing testing exhaustively to test all software behaviours is impossible. Numerous testing approaches exist. However, they do not directly concern the information derived during the safety analysis. STPA (Systems-Theoretic Process Analysis) is a unique safety analysis approach based on system and control theory, and was developed to identify unsafe scenarios of a complex system including software. In this paper, we present a systematic and semi-automatic testing approach based on STPA to generate test cases from the STPA safety analysis results to help software and safety engineers to recognize and reduce the associated software risks. We also provide an open-source safety-based testing tool called STPA TCGenerator to support the proposed approach. We illustrate the proposed approach with a prototype of a software of the Adaptive Cruise Control System (ACC) with a stop-and-go function with a Lego-Mindstorms EV3 robot.

Asim Abdulkhaleq, Stefan Wagner, Daniel Lammering et al.

Safety has become of paramount importance in the development lifecycle of the modern automobile systems. However, the current automotive safety standard ISO 26262 does not specify clearly the methods for safety analysis. Different methods are recommended for this purpose. FTA (Fault Tree Analysis) and FMEA (Failure Mode and Effects Analysis) are used in the most recent ISO 26262 applications to identify component failures, errors and faults that lead to specific hazards (in the presence of faults). However, these methods are based on reliability theory, and they are not adequate to address new hazards caused by dysfunctional component interactions, software failure or human error. A holistic approach was developed called STPA (Systems-Theoretic Process Analysis) which addresses more types of hazards and treats safety as a dynamic control problem rather than an individual component failure. STPA also addresses types of hazardous causes in the absence of failure. Accordingly, there is a need for investigating hazard analysis techniques like STPA. In this paper, we present a concept on how to use STPA to extend the safety scope of ISO 26262 and support the Hazard Analysis and Risk Assessments (HARA) process. We applied the proposed concept to a current project of a fully automated vehicle at Continental. As a result, we identified 24 system- level accidents, 176 hazards, 27 unsafe control actions, and 129 unsafe scenarios. We conclude that STPA is an effective and efficient approach to derive detailed safety constraints. STPA can support the functional safety engineers to evaluate the architectural design of fully automated vehicles and build the functional safety concept.