Using Deductive Cause-Consequence Analysis (DCCA) with SCADE

Esterel Technologies’ SCADE Suite is one of the most important development tools for software for safety-critical systems. It is used for designing many critical components of aerospace, automotive and transportation applications. For such systems safety analysis is a key requirement in the development process. In this paper we show how one formal safety analysis method – Deductive Cause-Consequence Analysis (DCCA) – can be integrated in the SCADE framework. This method allows for performing safety analysis largely automatically. It uses SCADE’s semantical model and SCADE’s built in verification engine Design Verifier. So the whole analysis can be done within one tool. This is of big importance, as a key feature for the acceptance of formal methods in broad engineering practice is, that they can be applied in an industrial development suite. We illustrate the method on a real world case study from transportation domain and discuss possible next steps and limitations.