1st Edition

Design and Safety Assessment of Critical Systems

By Marco Bozzano, Adolfo Villafiorita Copyright 2010
    298 Pages 81 B/W Illustrations
    by Auerbach Publications

    Safety-critical systems, by definition those systems whose failure can cause catastrophic results for people, the environment, and the economy, are becoming increasingly complex both in their functionality and their interactions with the environment. Unfortunately, safety assessments are still largely done manually, a time-consuming and error-prone process. The growing complexity of these systems requires an increase in the skill and efficacy of safety engineers and encourages the adoption of formal and standardized techniques.

    An introduction to the area of design and verification of safety-critical systems, Design and Safety Assessment of Critical Systems focuses on safety assessment using formal methods. Beginning with an introduction to the fundamental concepts of safety and reliability, it illustrates the pivotal issues of design, development, and safety assessment of critical systems.

    The core of the book covers traditional notations, techniques, and procedures, including Fault Tree Analysis, FMECA, HAZOP, and Event Tree Analysis, and explains in detail how formal methods can be used to realize such procedures. It looks at the development process of safety-critical systems, and highlights influential management and organizational aspects. Finally, it describes verification and validation techniques and new trends in formal methods for safety and concludes with some widely adopted standards for the certification of safety-critical systems.

    Providing an in-depth and hands-on view of the application of formal techniques to advanced and critical safety assessments in a variety of industrial sectors, such as transportation, avionics and aerospace, and nuclear power, Design and Safety Assessment of Critical Systems allows anyone with a basic background in mathematics or computer science to move confidently into this advanced arena of safety assessment.

    Introduction
    Complex Safety-Critical Systems
    Dealing with Failures: A Short History of Safety Engineering
    The Role of Formal Methods
    A Case Study: Three Mile Island
    References

    Dependability, Reliability, and Safety Assessment
    Concepts
    Classification of Faults
    Fault Models
    Managing Faults
    Fault Detection
    Fault Prediction
    Fault Tolerance
    Fault Coverage
    Reliability Modeling
    System Reliability

    Techniques for Safety Assessment
    Hazard Analysis
    Risk Analysis
    Risk Measures

    Development of Safety-Critical Applications
    What Makes a System Complex
    What Makes the Development Complex
    Measuring the Impact of Complexity
    From System to Process
    A General Development Framework
    Development Workflow
    Testing Workflow
    Safety Assessment Workflow
    Certification Management Workflow
    Project Management Workflow
    Tool Support
    Improving the Process: Maturity Models

    Formal Methods for Safety Assessment
    Advantages of Formal Methods
    Formal Methods in the Development Process
    Problems and Limitations
    History of Formal Methods
    Formal Models and Specification
    Formal Methods for Verification and Validation
    Formal Safety Analysis
    Industrial Applications of Formal Methods
    Conclusions and Future Directions

    Formal Methods for Certification
    Certification of Avionic Systems
    So Many Standards, So Little Time
    The ECSS System of Standards
    Avionics Reference Standards
    ARP 4754
    ARP 4761
    DO-178B
    The Case for the Safety Case
    Formal Methods and Certification
    References

    Appendices:
    The NuSMV Model Checker
    The FSAP Safety Analysis Platform
    Some Regulatory Bodies and Regulations
    Index

    Biography

    Marco Bozzano is a senior researcher in the Embedded Systems Unit of Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Italy. He has strong expertise in the application of formal methods, and he has published a number of papers in the area of formal verification of safety critical systems.

    Adolfo Villafiorita is a senior researcher at Fondazione Bruno Kessler. He has many years of experience in the application of formal methods in technology transfer projects and in the development of security and safety-critical applications. He is a contract professor at the University of Trento.