Universal Safety Format: Automated Safety Software Generation

Abstract

The development of safety-critical software requires a significant additional effort compared to standard software. Safety mechanisms, e.g., for mitigating hardware errors, have to be designed and integrated into the functional code. This results not only in substantial implementation overhead, but also reduces the overall maintainability of the software. In this paper, we present the Universal Safety Format (USF), which enables a model-driven approach that complies with the separation of concerns principle. Software safety mechanisms are specified as patterns via a domain-agnostic transformation language, separated from the functional software. Various domain-specific tools apply these safety patterns to domain-specific artifacts, such as code or software architecture models. This enables the reuse of safety patterns in multiple designs as well as in a single design to artifacts from different domains.