Abstract

An essential basis for the development of safety-critical systems is to establish high-quality requirements specifications. However, there is little guidance on the formulation of requirements for the architectures of these systems. Existing approaches to eliciting safety requirements such as those advocated by ARP 4761 and 4754 focus on the hazard analysis of either purely functional requirements (i.e. Functional Hazard Analysis) or Zonal and Particular Risks Assessments that can only be performed once the physical details of systems have been defined (typically, late lifecycle). Furthermore, there needs to be systematic consideration of the behaviours of architectural components to help refine safety requirements. In this paper, we present an approach to deriving safety requirements using Use Case Maps. Use Case Maps help capture the early interaction between requirements and architectural components and help formulate safety requirements in the early stages of architecture definition. The aim of this approach is to provide assurance on the integrity of requirements elicitation and formulation. Practical techniques for prioritising safety requirements are also integrated in this approach. We illustrate the approach by means of an example.

-- Daniel Amyot - 01 Apr 2008

Discussion

• Paper available at http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/~tpk/wwuissc06.pdf
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