Conceptual Modelling of the Dynamic Goal-oriented Safety Management for Safety Critical Systems

Abstract

In the context of Safety Critical Systems (SCSs), safety measures derived from the dysfunctional analysis are generally expressed in an informal way. However, in an early phase of SCSs design, there is a need to link these safety measures to Goal-Oriented Requirements Engineering (GORE) concepts. Moreover, the current practice of the safety measures development is not based on a specific goal-oriented control model. Since there are different knowledge domains, there is a lack of a common vocabulary aiming to avoid the semantic heterogeneity between them. Consequently, a common model for an unambiguous knowledge sharing and a full semantic interoperability assurance is missing. In this paper, we propose the Goal-Oriented Safety Management Ontology (GOSMO), a domain ontology, which is grounded in the Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO) and provides a conceptualization and a real-world semantic interpretation of the knowledge matching for SCSs. Furthermore, the proposed safety measures development process is performed using a reinterpretation from the safety point of view of the Organization-Based Control Access (Or-BAC), which was initially developed for the Information Systems (IS) security. The GOSMO aims to capture the alignment between the considered domains concepts through the reference models reuse and the proposed taxonomy based on standards definitions. The proposed ontology is evaluated by the formalization of two cases studies from the railway domain, since it is the target application domain. Finally, the evaluation results show that GOSMO covers and analyses several real critical situations and fulfils its intended purpose.