SmartTies - Management of Safety-Critical Developments

Formal methods have been successfully used to establish assurances for safety-critical systems with mathematical rigour. Based on our experience in developing a methodology and corresponding tools for a change management for formal methods, we have generalised this approach to a comprehensive methodology to maintain heterogeneous document collections consisting of both formal and informal documents. Although informal documents, like natural language text, lack a formal interpretation, they still expose a visible structure that reflects different aspects or parts of a development and follows explicit rules formulated in development guidelines. This paper presents our general methodology for maintaining heterogeneous document collections and illustrates its instantiation in the SmartTies tool that supports the development of safety-critical systems. SmartTies utilises the structuring mechanisms prescribed in a certification process (e.g. IEC EN 61508) to analyze and maintain the documents occurring in a safety-critical development process.