Method Based on SEFT-to-Petri for Safety Analysis of Software

Abstract

System safety is a vital non-functional requirement whose satisfaction is essential for system software. However, modern aerospace system software is more and more complicated, which results in a high complexity of analyzing system faults. With the increased acceptance of Model-based Systems Engineering as a new method for systems engineering, Model-based Safety Analysis is also proposed to formalize the task of safety analysis and automate the safety calculations. Our work is grounded on State/Event Fault Tree to analyze system faults and build functional model. Firstly, we can translate SEFT to state machine based on SysML with fault syntactic messages and match elements together with translating logic gates; after which, transforming state machine into Petri Net model by means of rigorous semantic relations to extract preliminary analytical model is deduced theoretically in this paper; finally, we can derive analyses of causes and results of faults from Petri Net model by adopting a set of mathematical and statistical analysis. Practically, we have also validated our work by a case study of an aeronautic control system to support this paper.