Failure Propagation Modeling and Analysis via System Interfaces

Lin Zhao,Krishnaiyan Thulasiraman,Ru Niu,Xiaocheng Ge

doi:10.1155/2016/8593612

Abstract

Safety-critical systems must be shown to be acceptably safe to deploy and use in their operational environment. One of the key concerns of developing safety-critical systems is to understand how the system behaves in the presence of failures, regardless of whether that failure is triggered by the external environment or caused by internal errors. Safety assessment at the early stages of system development involves analysis of potential failures and their consequences. Increasingly, for complex systems, model-based safety assessment is becoming more widely used. In this paper we propose an approach for safety analysis based on system interface models. By extending interaction models on the system interface level with failure modes as well as relevant portions of the physical system to be controlled, automated support could be provided for much of the failure analysis. We focus on fault modeling and on how to compute minimal cut sets. Particularly, we explore state space reconstruction strategy and bounded searching technique to reduce the number of states that need to be analyzed, which remarkably improves the efficiency of cut sets searching algorithm.

Highlights

Our society is relying more and more on the safety of a number of computer-based systems, for example, the control system of managing air traffic or operating a nuclear power plant
We propose an approach of model-based safety analysis which utilizes extended interface automata [13] to model the nominal behaviors as well as fault behaviors of the system
Safety analysis is indispensable for ensuring the system safety but is very time-consuming and error-prone

Summary

Introduction

Our society is relying more and more on the safety of a number of computer-based systems, for example, the control system of managing air traffic or operating a nuclear power plant. Model-based safety analysis (MBSA), where the analysis is carried out on formal system models that take into account system behaviors in the presence of faults, has been proposed to address some of the issues specific to safety assessment. Recent work in this area has demonstrated some advantages of this methodology over traditional approaches, for example, the capability of automatic generation of safety artifacts, and shown that it is a promising way to reduce costs while further improving efficiency and quality of safety analysis process.

Interfaces and Fault Modeling

Algorithms Assist in Failure Analysis

Fuel Supply System Example

Conclusions and Future Directions