A model-based framework for flexible safety-critical software development

Abstract

This paper presents the findings from a design study of a model-based framework for safety-critical software development, called SimPal. The objective of the study was to better understand the necessary properties of such a framework and to learn more about the challenges of realizing it. Our research approach can be labeled as design research, which means that we try to answer our research questions by developing an artifact, in our case SimPal, and analyzing our experiences from the design of the artifact. In the paper we present what we identify as the necessary quality characteristics, using the ISO25010 quality in use quality model, of a framework like SimPal. These characteristics are then used to evaluate the SimPal framework in combination with a simple design case where we design a soft safety controller. We show that our approach has potential considering safety-critical software development. Although, there are some concerns about its run-time performance, from our results we conclude that the ideas behind the SimPal framework are sound but more work is required to investigate how they can be realized. In the future more effort should be spent on increasing performance and adding more features to the framework.