Safety-Oriented Software Architecture Design Approach
Yuling Huang · 2013
With the increasing attention of software safety, how to improve software safety has already become a more important concerned issue, especially for the safety-critical systems.Currently, the influence of architecture in assurance of software safety is being increasingly recognized.Safety design at architecture level can effectively improve software or system safety.This paper focus on how to consider safety in software architecture design phase and proposed a safety-oriented software architecture design approach.Through the system hazard analysis, this design approach uses the selected combination of safety tactics to effectively improve the software or system safety, providing a new way of thinking for software safety architecture design. I I I Introduction ntroduction ntroduction ntroductionSafety Critical System (SCS) refers to the system which has potentially destructive power.Once such a system produced a failure, many serious consequences may be caused, such as casualties, property loss and environmental damage etc.In recent years, software application in SCS is more and more extensive, and the scale also increasingly grows.From railway transit field to the aerospace field and from the power system to the medical system, this type of software plays a key role in command and control aspect for software safety.The core research in SCS safety is how to reduce the probability of unsafe system conditions that various SCS elements lead to, or weaken the SCS's consequences that failures produce, through using a variety of management, organization, technical measures [1] .This is also the focus of this paper.Since software architecture (SA) was proposed, it has been favored by many researchers and practitioners, and become an important research field of software engineering.SA determines a system's main structure, macroscopic properties, its basic functions and characteristics.SA is the basis and the key to success of the whole software design.Currently, SA design methods mostly focus on system's non-functional requirements (NFR), for instance safety or reliability, into consideration.SA design combining with SA analysis method, researchers hope to find the potential risk in early software life cycle [2] .The research on safe SA not only can ensure the safety of SA-based software development components, but also can ensure the safety of the final software product.Software safety and reliability have different characteristics.The former pay more attention to software defect that lead to enter the unsafe state and how to reduce the risk of system failure which can led to the catastrophic accidents.So far, however, the work combined safety and SA design is very scarce.So, there is little guidance on how to address safety concerns in shaping a safe SA and how to improve SA by using basic safety tactics.In order to improve this situation, this paper proposed a safety-oriented software architecture design approach.