Industrial Perspective on Reuse of Safety Artifacts in Software Product Lines

In the future, safety-critical industrial products will have to be maintained and variants will have to be produced. In order to do this economically, the safety artifacts of the components should also be reused. At present, however, it is still unclear how this reuse could take place. Moreover this reuse is complicated, by the different situations in the various industries involved and by the corresponding standards applied. Current industrial practice for certification processes relies on a component-based view of reuse. We investigate the possibilities of product lines with managed processes for reuse also across multiple domains. In order to identify the challenges and possible solutions, we conducted interviews with industry partners from the domains of ICT, Rail, Automotive, and Industrial Automation, and from small- and medium-sized enterprises to large organizations. The semi-structured interviews identified the characteristics of current safety engineering processes, the handling of general variety and reuse, the approach followed for safety artifacts, and the need for improvement. In addition, a detailed literature survey summarizes existing approaches. We investigate which modularity concepts exist for dealing with safety, how variability concepts integrate safety, by which means process models can consider safety, and how safety cases are evolved while maintenance takes place. An overview of similar research projects complements the analysis. The identified challenges and potential solution proposals show how safety is related to Software Product Lines.