A comprehensive safety engineering approach for software-intensive systems based on STPA
This is an incremental improvement for safety-critical software systems, addressing the difficulty of defining software safety requirements with traditional techniques.
The paper tackles the challenge of ensuring safety in software-intensive systems by proposing a comprehensive safety engineering approach based on STPA, integrating software testing and model checking, and demonstrates its application with an automotive software controller.
Formal verification and testing are complementary approaches which are used in the development process to verify the functional correctness of software. However, the correctness of software cannot ensure the safe operation of safety-critical software systems. The software must be verified against its safety requirements which are identified by safety analysis, to ensure that potential hazardous causes cannot occur. The complexity of software makes defining appropriate software safety requirements with traditional safety analysis techniques difficult. STPA (Systems-Theoretic Processes Analysis) is a unique safety analysis approach that has been developed to identify system hazards, including the software-related hazards. This paper presents a comprehensive safety engineering approach based on STPA, including software testing and model checking approaches for the purpose of developing safe software. The proposed approach can be embedded within a defined software engineering process or applied to existing software systems, allow software and safety engineers integrate the analysis of software risks with their verification. The application of the proposed approach is illustrated with an automotive software controller.