A workflow for automatically generating application-level safety mechanisms from UML stereotype model representations

Abstract

Safety-critical systems operate in contexts where failure may lead to serious harm for humans or the environment. Safety standards, e.g., IEC 61508 or ISO 26262, provide development guidelines to improve the safety of such systems. For this, they recommend a variety of safety mechanisms to mitigate possible safety hazards. While these standards recommend certain safety mechanisms, they do not provide any concrete development or implementation assistance for any of these techniques. This paper presents a detailed workflow, how such safety mechanisms may be automatically generated from UML model representations in a model-driven development process. We illustrate this approach by applying it to the modeling and automatic generation of voting mechanisms, which are a wide-spread safety mechanism in safety-critical systems that employ some form of redundancy for fault detection or fault masking. Finally, we study the scalability of the proposed code generation via quantitative experiments. © Copyright 2020 by SCITEPRESS - Science and Technology Publications, Lda. All rights reserved.