Evolving Critical Systems: A Research Agenda for Computer-Based Systems

Hinchey, Michael G.; Coyle, Lorcan

doi:10.1109/ecbs.2010.56

Cited by 18 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 7 publications

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“…Other identified challenges in impact analysis for safety-critical systems include: the impact of component reuse and evolution on safety [14], determining if a component can be reused [25], the vast amount of artefacts to trace and the need for safety assessors' confidence [46], the need for planning and documenting impact analysis [55], and the difficulty in ensuring system safety after a change [66].…”

Section: Impact Analysis For Safety-critical Systemsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…o Difficulty in estimating the effort required to manage a change (e.g., [14]); o Too coarse granularity of the traceability between artefacts to accurately know the consequences of a change (e.g., [18]) o Excessive detail of the traceability between artefacts, making traceability management more complex than necessary for impact analysis purposes (e.g., [25]) o Unclear meaning of the traceability between artefacts in order to know how to manage a change (e.g., [42]) o Insufficient traceability between artefacts to accurately know the consequences of a change (e.g., [46]) o Long time for evaluating the consequences of a change (e.g., [46]) o Insufficient confidence by assessor or certifiers in having managed a change properly (e.g., [46]) o Vast number of artefacts to trace (e.g., [48]) o Insufficient tool support (e.g., [48]) o Lack of a systematic process for performing impact analysis (e.g., [49]) o Difficulty in determining the effect of a change on system safety (e.g., [49]) o Difficulty in deciding if a component can be reused (e.g., [57]) o Difficulty in assessing system-level impact of component reuse (e.g., [66]) The pages and the options of the questions were presented in a randomized order to mitigate threats to validity, particularly errors and omissions due to respondents' fatigue. Definitions and clarifications were provided for those parts of the questionnaire in which the risk of misinterpretations was identified.…”

Section: Survey Designmentioning

confidence: 99%

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An Industrial Survey of Safety Evidence Change Impact Analysis Practice

Vara

Borg

Wnuk

et al. 2016

IIEEE Trans. Software Eng.

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Abstract-Context. In many application domains, critical systems must comply with safety standards. This involves gathering safety evidence in the form of artefacts such as safety analyses, system specifications, and testing results. These artefacts can evolve during a system's lifecycle, creating a need for change impact analysis to guarantee that system safety and compliance are not jeopardised. Objective. We aim to provide new insights into how safety evidence change impact analysis is addressed in practice. The knowledge about this activity is limited despite the extensive research that has been conducted on change impact analysis and on safety evidence management. Method. We conducted an industrial survey on the circumstances under which safety evidence change impact analysis is addressed, the tool support used, and the challenges faced. Results. We obtained 97 valid responses representing 16 application domains, 28 countries, and 47 safety standards. The respondents had most often performed safety evidence change impact analysis during system development, from system specifications, and fully manually. No commercial change impact analysis tool was reported as used for all artefact types and insufficient tool support was the most frequent challenge. Conclusion. The results suggest that the different artefact types used as safety evidence co-evolve. In addition, the evolution of safety cases should probably be better managed, the level of automation in safety evidence change impact analysis is low, and the state of the practice can benefit from over 20 improvement areas.

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Section: Impact Analysis For Safety-critical Systemsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Survey Designmentioning

confidence: 99%

An Industrial Survey of Safety Evidence Change Impact Analysis Practice

Vara

Borg

Wnuk

et al. 2016

IIEEE Trans. Software Eng.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…Moreover, this style can be supportive for the verification of critical systems as verifying a component's behaviour is independent of other components in the system. Verification of a critical system is an important activity of CPS construction [17].…”

Section: Component Connectormentioning

confidence: 99%

Incremental Composition Process for the Construction of Component-Based Management Systems

Rana

Bangash

Baz

et al. 2020

Sensors

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Cyber-physical systems (CPS) are composed of software and hardware components. Many such systems (e.g., IoT based systems) are created by composing existing systems together. Some of these systems are of critical nature, e.g., emergency or disaster management systems. In general, component-based development (CBD) is a useful approach for constructing systems by composing pre-built and tested components. However, for critical systems, a development method must provide ways to verify the partial system at different stages of the construction process. In this paper, for system architectures, we propose two styles: rigid architecture and flexible architecture. A system architecture composed of independent components by coordinating exogenous connectors is in flexible architecture style category. For CBD of critical systems, we select EX-MAN from flexible architecture style category. Moreover, we define incremental composition mechanism for this model to construct critical systems from a set of system requirements. Incremental composition is defined to offer preservation of system behaviour and correctness of partial architecture at each incremental step. To evaluate our proposed approach, a case study of weather monitoring system (part of a disaster management) system was built using our EX-MAN tool.are caused by disasters occurring due to the changes in the weather conditions. Hardware devices to read changes in weather situations are readily available by multiple vendors. Hence, a disaster management system based on weather changes is a typical cyber-physical system (CPS) for which a safe and verifiable construction method is needed. A well-defined mechanism for the composition of existing systems into a predictable/verifiable system is the core of such a method. The essence of this composition is to provide a way to reuse existing work.In general, the trend toward reuse in software engineering has increased the importance of composition mechanisms. Program or code reuse is one of the simplest and oldest techniques to reduce the cost by composing existing program units into larger units. The concept of 'software reuse' was first used in 1968 [5]. Software reuse appears at many different levels of solution development, such as code level by reusing programming language constructs (e.g., selection, sequence and looping) [6], functions/services level and data structure level. The next level is the solution domain specific and application domain specific components [7]. Software reuse, being a simple but effective technique for reducing the software development cost, appears in many forms from ad-hoc or white-box to systematic or black-box approaches [8].In the context of the aforesaid, component-based development (CBD) can be used for the construction of management systems in a shorter time. In CBD, software components provide large-scale reuse of their intellectual property, offering reduced development and maintenance cost. Composition must be systematic or hierarchical with fixed semantics from the simplest level o...

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“…As the physical world is not predictable, the composition in CPS becomes more important if the The associate editor coordinating the review of this manuscript and approving it for publication was Wei Yu . system is evolving [20]. In this paper, for CPS construction under the CBD approach, we propose a language to fix the meaning of composition in EX-MAN component model [42].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Flow Constraint Language for Coordination by Exogenous Connectors

2019

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Construction of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) by reusing or composing existing components (sub-systems) is the emerging need in software based system development. For software development, a number of paradigms exists to deal with the reusability at different levels. Component-based development (CBD) represents a paradigm shift in software development for its emphasis on development for/with reuse. Software composition mechanisms are the essence of this paradigm. In general, a software system in CBD is comprised of two kinds of elements: computation and communication. Defining/creating these elements in a generic way and for system construction allowing these elements to be customised in specific to the system needs can increase the level of reusability. In this paper, for a development paradigm (referred to as EX-MAN in CBD) for CPS construction, we focus on software elements dealing with the communications elements (referred to as connectors) among the computational elements. We define constraints (written in our proposed flow constraint language (FCL)) as a property for coordination by the exogenous connectors to customise the behaviour of connectors for system construction. In this paper, the semantics of FCL constraints for a sample exogenous connector is described for system construction/execution. In order to verify the operational semantics of FCL constraints of this exogenous connector, we use Coloured Petri Nets (in CPN tools) to model and simulate the connectors with constraints. Exogenous connectors are implemented in a tool exogenous composition framework (ECF) for system construction.

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Evolving Critical Systems: A Research Agenda for Computer-Based Systems

Cited by 18 publications

References 7 publications

An Industrial Survey of Safety Evidence Change Impact Analysis Practice

An Industrial Survey of Safety Evidence Change Impact Analysis Practice

Incremental Composition Process for the Construction of Component-Based Management Systems

Flow Constraint Language for Coordination by Exogenous Connectors

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