Safety Interfaces for Component-Based Systems

This paper addresses the problems appearing in component-based development of safety-critical systems. We aim at efficient reasoning about safety at system level while adding or replacing components. For safety-related reasoning it does not suffice to consider functioning components in their ”intended” environments but also the behaviour of components in presence of single or multiple faults. Our contribution is a formal component model that includes the notion of a safety interface. It describes how the component behaves with respect to violation of a given system-level property in presence of faults in its environment. We also present an algorithm for deriving safety interfaces given a particular safety property and fault modes for the component. Moreover, we present compositional proof rules that can be applied to reason about the fault tolerance of the composed system by analyzing the safety interfaces of the components. Finally, we evaluate the above technique in a real aerospace application.