Assurance of System Safety: A Survey of Design and Argument Patterns

Abstract

The specification, design, and assurance of safety encompasses various concepts and best practices, subject of reuse in form of patterns. This work summarizes applied research on such concepts and practices with a focus on the last two decades and on the state-of-the-art of patterns in safety-critical system design and assurance argumentation. We investigate several aspects of such patterns, for example, where and when they are applied, their characteristics and purposes, and how they are related. For each aspect, we provide an overview of relevant studies and synthesize a taxonomy of first principles underlying these patterns. Furthermore, we comment on how these studies address known challenges and we discuss suggestions for further research. Our findings disclose a lack of research on how patterns improve system safety claims and, vice versa, on the decomposition of system safety into separated local concerns, and on the impact of security on safety. CCS Concepts: • General and reference → Design; Reliability; • Computer systems organization → Architectures; Dependable and fault-tolerant systems and networks; • Hardware → Safety critical systems; • Software and its engineering → Software safety; Error handling and recovery; Software verification and validation; Risk management; • Security and privacy → Security in hardware.

Dependability Patterns: A Survey

“…Ayoub et al [130] presented a safety case pattern to argue about the correctness of implementations developed using model-based approaches. Gleischer and Kugele wrote an extensive survey of safety and arguments [67,131], where they also considered related aspects that may affect safety, including security and reliability. L. Yuan et al proposed a heterogeneous software architecture, GFTSA (Generic Fault-Tolerant Software Architecture), that can guide the development of safety-critical distributed systems [117].…”

Taxonomy to Unify Fault Tolerance Regimes for Automotive Systems: Defining Fail-Operational, Fail-Degraded, and Fail-Safe

“…Still, aside from standards, several publications related to the automotive domain give definitions for different fault tolerance regimes [24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42]. An overview of the covered literature is presented in Table I.…”

“…1) Upholding functionality: All publications referenced in this subsection, except for [39], define terms to address the continued provision of a system's functionality in the presence of a fault without performance degradation [24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][40][41][42] and consistently use the term fail-operational. Still, when Author(s) Year Source f a i l -o p e r a t i o n a l f a i l -s a f e f a i l -s i l e n t f a i l -d e g r a d e d f a i l -r e d u c e d f a i l -u n s a f e o t h e r Automotive publications with defintions of fault tolerance regimes Publications in automated vehicle context using fault tolerance regimes without definitions comparing the definitions, the understanding of the term varies slightly between the publications.…”

“…In the first subcategory [24,40,46,47], a core functionality of the fail-operational system is maintained to achieve a defined state. The sole publication of the second subcategory [27] requires the system to maintain full functionality until the defined state is reached. It is not apparent to which subcategory each of the remaining publications [28][29][30]35] can be assigned.…”

“…The fail-silent property of a system is commonly described as the guarantee that no output is provided in the event of failures [24,26,27,29,32,34,41,46]. Therefore, the systems described as fail-silent usually represent (sub-)components of a larger complex system (e. g., a vehicle).…”