Towards an approach to represent safety patterns

Safety-critical systems are complex entities, which, due to severe regulations, demand continuous development of approaches for supporting their construction. To keep safety-critical systems free of failures, it is fundamental to identify potential failure modes and their causes, and to eliminate them. One major approach to solving failure modes is the application of safety patterns at the architectural level of such systems. However, this is not trivial, since safety patterns have not been represented in a widely accepted way that would facilitate their understanding and use. In order to contribute to filling this gap, we present in this paper an approach for representing safety patterns in a way that allows them to be properly modeled and also offers means to support their application in architectural models. To this end, we propose the joint use of a UML profile and rules that are descriptive structures stating safety patterns application constraints. We have observed that our approach makes the safety patterns easy to represent and apply, thus contributing to the development of safety-critical systems.