Integrating safety analyses and component-based design

In recent years, awareness of how software impacts safety has increased rapidly. Instead of regarding software as a black box, more and more standards demand safety analyses of software architectures and software design. Due to the complexity of software-intensive embedded systems, safety analyses easily become very complex, time consuming, and error prone. To overcome these problems, safety analyses have to be integrated into the complete development process as tightly as possible. This paper introduces an approach to integrating safety analyses into a component-oriented, model-based software engineering approach. The reasons for this are twofold: First, component- and model-based development have already been proven in practical use to handle complexity and reduce effort. Second, they easily support the integration of functional and non-functional properties into design, which can be used to integrate safety analyses.