Integrated safety analysis of software-controlled critical systems

  • Authors:
  • Ben Swarup Medikonda;P. Seetha Ramaiah

  • Affiliations:
  • Andhra University, Visakhapatnam, India;Andhra University, Visakhapatnam, India

  • Venue:
  • ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

Software for safety-critical systems must deal with the hazards identified by safety analysis in order to make the system safe, risk-free and fail-safe. Certain faults in critical systems can result in catastrophic consequences such as death, injury or environmental harm. The focus of this paper is an integrated approach to software safety analysis based on a combination of two existing fault removal techniques, and implementation of software safety in developing a small prototype safety-critical system. A comprehensive software safety analysis involving a combination of Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA) and Fault Tree Analysis (FTA) techniques is conducted on the software functions of the critical system to identify potentially hazardous software faults. A prototype safety-critical system - Railroad Crossing Control System (RCCS), incorporating a microcontroller and software to operate the train on a track circuit is described. We also briefly compare safety-specific and non-safety specific techniques at developing RCCS.