Model Driven Engineering and Functional Safety

The development of software for domains such as avionics, automotive and healthcare is heavily regulated via safety standards. The effort to interpret the underlying standards is cumbersome and time consuming. The certification of components is expensive. Changing the components or applying the components in another domain involves in many cases re-certification. The representation of relevant information from standards in an electronic form enables, for instance, a faster and more robust safety argumentation. In the OPENCOSS project, www.opencoss.eu, a generic meta-model is developed to support the re-use of safety assurance data. Based on this generic meta-model, conceptual models in the form of meta-models to represent standards, e.g. the ISO 26262 standard, are derived. Model transformations are used to express the mapping between the conceptual models of the safety standards. Furthermore, the safety standard conceptual models can facilitate the construction of safety cases via (derived) vocabularies. This reduces inconsistencies and improves the clearness of the safety cases. Safety argumentation editors, based on EMF and Xtext, have been developed.