Addressing safety in software product line engineering using formal methods

Product line engineering and safety engineering for software have both become mainstays to address the current challenges in developing software-intensive, safety-critical embedded systems. They address orthogonal concerns and the concepts and methods used by them have naturally evolved independently. A holistic, streamlined approach toward system engineering, however, obviously needs to identify and exploit the opportunities for a beneficial interplay between the two. We believe that appropriate formal models and methods can provide a suitable backbone in realizing such an approach. In this article, we present the specific issues that arise while addressing safety in the software product line engineering context and discuss where/how formal methods can provide the necessary techniques to address them.