Means-ends and whole-part traceability analysis of safety requirements

Safety is a system property, hence the high-level safety requirements are incorporated into the implementation of system components. In this paper, we propose an optimized traceability analysis method which is based on the means-ends and whole-part concept of the approach for cognitive systems engineering to trace these safety requirements. A system consists of hardware, software, and humans according to a whole-part decomposition. The safety requirements of a system and its components are enforced or implemented through a means-ends lifecycle. To provide evidence of the safety of a system, the means-ends and whole-part traceability analysis method will optimize the creation of safety evidence from the safety requirements, safety analysis results, and other system artifacts produced through a lifecycle. These sources of safety evidence have a causal (cause-consequence) relationship between each other. The failure mode and effect analysis (FMEA), the hazard and operability analysis (HAZOP), and the fault tree analysis (FTA) techniques are generally used for safety analysis of systems and their components. These techniques cover the causal relations in a safety analysis. The causal relationships in the proposed method make it possible to trace the safety requirements through the safety analysis results and system artifacts. We present the proposed approach with an example, and described the usage of TRACE and NuSRS tools to apply the approach. 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.