Design for safety in Safecharts with risk ordering of states

Abstract

Safecharts is a variant of Statecharts intended exclusively for safety critical systems design. With two separate representations for functional and safety requirements, Safecharts brings the distinctions and dependencies between them into sharper focus, helping both designers and auditors alike in modelling and reviewing safety features. Safecharts incorporates ways to represent equipment failures and failure handling mechanisms and uses a safety-oriented classification of transitions and a safety-oriented scheme for resolving any unpredictable non-deterministic pattern of behaviour. It achieves these through an explicit representation of risks posed by hazardous states by means of an ordering of states and a concept called risk band. Recognising the possibility of gaps and inaccuracies in safety analysis, Safecharts do not permit transitions between states with unknown relative risk levels. However, in order to limit the number of transitions excluded in this manner, Safecharts provides a default interpretation for relative risk levels between states not covered by the risk ordering relation, requiring the designer to clarify the risk levels in the event of a disagreement and thus improving the risk assessment process.