Hazard and Operability (HAZOP) Analysis of Safety-Related Scientific Software

Abstract

Hazard and operability (HAZOP) analysis technique is used to identify and analyze hazards and operational concerns of a system. It provides a structured framework that can be used to perform a step-by-step safety analysis of a system. This paper details how to apply this method to safety-related scientific software. In this paper, we have developed (1) a nomenclature that singles out 30 primary concepts (2) a canonic set of abstractions of software programming constructs as a function of the primary concepts; (3) a process of translation from an existing design representation to the target design representation in the form of finite state machines; (4) HAZOP templates for each canonical form; and (5) an input variable prioritization method. We also developed a computational tool that can be used to perform HAZOP analysis of scientific software. Its results are compared with those obtained during manual HAZOP analysis by calculating the value of Shannon entropy, correctness, and the time required to perform each analysis. Overall, this method helps identify useful information about the impact of variables in the code that can then be utilized to develop robust code for making safety-critical decisions.