A safety-critical software development strategy based on theory of diverse design

Abstract

As an effective method to improve software reliability and safety, diverse design has been widely used in safety-critical software development in the aviation, aerospace and rail transportation areas. Since N-version programming costs a lot and automatic code generation tools have been widely used nowadays, a safety-critical software development strategy based on theory of diverse design, which is combined with automatic code generation tools, is proposed in this paper. Qualitative analysis on the diversity and cost of software developed through this strategy is also completed in this paper to show that this strategy can effectively avoid common-cause failures and improve the safety of safety-critical software. At last, safety-critical software development process based on this strategy is proposed.