Expressing best practices in (risk) analysis and testing of safety-critical systems using patterns

The continuing pervasion of our society with safety-critical cyber-physical systems not only demands for adequate (risk) analysis, testing and verification techniques, it also generates growing experience on their use, which can be considered as important as the tools themselves for their efficient use. This paper introduces workflow patterns to describe such best practices in a systematic way that efficiently represents this knowledge, and also provides a way to relate different patterns, making them easier to identify and use, and cover as wide a range of experiences as possible. The value of the approach is demonstrated using some pattern examples from a collection developed in the Artemis-project MBAT. Finally, the paper presents a wiki-based approach for developing and maintaining the pattern collection.