Automation of Safety Analysis for Cyber-Physical Systems of Transport Industry
Autosafe is a tool developed in collaboration with University Stuttgart to automate the fault tree generation process. AUTOSAFE will not only decrease the time required to develop fault trees but also improve their consistency and correctness.
Our submission ” AUTOSAFE: Automatic Fault Tree Synthesis for Cyber-Physical Systems” has been included at the 31st European Safety and Reliability Conference (ESREL2021). It has bee presented by safety and reliability engineer Muketaer Wumaierjiang and co-authored by Muketaer Wumaierjiang, Bradley Sams, Matthias Brunner, Björn Annighöfer, Robert Muirhead and Stuart Baskcomb.
In spring 2023 we have started to develop the second stage of our research project in Autosafe 2.0.
Safety analysis is a key pillar of compliance demonstration for aircraft and other complex cyber-physical systems with the safety requirements of the certification authorities. Fault tree analysis is a well-established and accepted methodology for this purpose. However, with the growing complexity of systems, consisting of software and complex electronic hardware and their inter-dependencies, it is becoming increasingly challenging and costly to manually conduct fault tree analysis. It is not only time consuming and error prone but also the quality (e.g. consistency and correctness) of the analysis is highly dependent on the ability of the individual Engineer. In order to address this issue, a software tool AUTOSAFE is being developed to automate the fault tree generation process. In AUTOSAFE, a domain-specific model is used to model system hardware structure and functions, as well as the failure propagation. An algorithm is developed to automatically generate fault trees. Key issues for the trustworthiness of generated fault-trees are completeness and understandability. Completeness is addressed with semi-automated inclusion of external events from an external events database into the automatically generated fault tree. Understandability is addressed with a novel requirements model and rigid naming conventions that are automatically considered during fault tree generation. In addition, a web-based tool architecture provides multi-user modeling. AUTOSAFE will not only decrease the time required to develop fault trees but also improve their consistency and correctness. In this paper, the concept and methods of the AUTOSAFE tool are introduced. Additionally, the workflow of system modelling, failure propagation modelling, and auto-generation of the fault tree are demonstrated with an exemplary system study.
Development of Autosafe was supported by Zentrale Innovationsprogramm Mittelstand (ZIM), an initiative of Bundesministerium für Wirtschaft und Energie.
The development of Autosafe 2.0 is supported by BIG (Brandenburgischer Innovationsgutschein) provided by the ILB (Investitons Bank des Landes Brandenburg).