Automated Integration of Safety Mechanisms into Functional Software for Safety-relevant Systems

Kurzfassung

Embedded systems have become indispensable in areas such as aerospace, the automotive industry, medical technology, and industrial control. Ensuring their reliable and safe operation is crucial for safeguarding human life and valuable assets. Software safety mechanisms play a key role in ensuring safety in these safety-relevant systems. International standards, such as IEC 61508, define necessary safety mechanisms to mitigate risks and achieve certification. This circumstance leads to an unchanging and recurring set of safety mechanisms that are manually re-implemented again and again from project to project. To make this software development process more efficient, this paper presents a model-based approach that utilizes a strict separation between functional and safety software to integrate safety mechanisms automatically into functional software for safety-related systems. An automated analysis of existing functional source code identifies possible integration points for safety mechanisms. A configuration a safety engineer creates is then used to integrate safety mechanisms from existing libraries through code generation. In addition to this approach, a prototypical implementation and its exemplary application are also described in this paper.