Variability-aware safety analysis using delta component fault diagrams

Abstract

Component Fault Diagrams (CFD) allow the specification of fault propagation paths, which is employed for the design of safety-critical systems as well as their certification. Even though families of safety-critical systems exist with many similar, yet not equal, variants there is no dedicated variability mechanism for CFDs to reuse commonalities of all family members and to alter only variable parts. In this paper, we present a variability representation approach for CFDs based on delta modeling that allows to transform an initial CFD within a closed or open variant space. Furthermore, we provide delta-aware analysis techniques for CFDs in order to analyse multiple variants efficiently. We show the feasibility of our approach by means of an example scenario based on the personal home robot TurtleBot using a prototypical implementation of our concepts.