A Model-based System Engineering Plugin for Safety Architecture Pattern Synthesis

: Safety architecture patterns are abstract representations to address faults in the system architecture. In the current state of practice, the decision of which safety architecture pattern to deploy and where in the system architecture is carried out manually by a safety expert. This decision may be time consuming or even lead to human errors. This paper presents Safety Pattern Synthesis, a tool for automating the recommendation of safety architecture patterns during the design of safety-critical systems: 1) Safety Pattern Synthesis recommends patterns to address faults in the system architecture (possibly resulting in more than one architectural solution), 2) the user selects the system architecture with patterns based on, e.g., the criteria provided by Safety Pattern Synthesis, and 3) Safety Pattern Synthesis provides certain requirements that shall be considered in the overall safety engineering process. The proposed tool has been implemented as a plugin in the model-based system engineering tool called AutoFOCUS3. Safety Pattern Synthesis is implemented in Java while using a logic-programming engine as a backend to reason about the safety of the system architecture. This paper provides implementation details about Safety Pattern Synthesis and its applicability in an industrial case study taken from the automotive domain.