Improving consistency checks between safety concepts and view based architecture design

Despite the early adoption of ISO 26262 by the automotive industry, managing functional safety in the early phases of system development remains a challenge. One key problem is how to efficiently keep safety assurance artifacts up-to-date considering the recurrent requirements changes during the system's lifecycle. Here, there is a real demand for means to support the creation, modification, and reuse of safety assurance documents, like the Safety Concepts described in ISO 26262. One major aspect of this challenge is inconsistency between safety concepts and system architecture. Usually created by different teams at different times and in different contexts of the development environment, these artifacts are often completely disassociated. This becomes even more evident when system maintenance is necessary; in this case, the inconsistencies result in intensive efforts to update the safety concepts impacted by the changes, and, consequently, significantly decrease the efficiency and efficacy of safety assurance. To overcome this challenge, we propose a model-based formalization approach for specifying safety concepts that allows creating precise traces to architectural elements while specifying safety concepts using natural language. We observed that our approach minimize the inconsistencies between safety models and architecture models, and offers basis to perform automated completeness and consistency checks.