Stephan Baumgart

Towards efficient functional safety certification of construction machinery using a component-based approach

Electronic systems in the automotive domain implement safety critical functionality in vehicles and the safety certification process according to a functional safety standard is time consuming and a big part of the expenses of a development project. We describe the functional safety certification of electronic automotive systems by presenting a use case from the construction equipment industry. In this context, we highlight some of the major challenges we foresee, while using a product line approach to achieve efficient functional safety certification of vehicle variants. We further elaborate on the impact of functional safety certification when applying the component-based approach on developing safety critical product variants and discuss the implications by cost modeling and analysis.

Industrial Challenges to Achieve Functional Safety Compliance in Product Lines

Developing safety critical products demands a clear safety argumentation for each product in spite of whether it has been derived from a product line or not. The functional safety standards do not explain how to develop safety critical products in product lines, and the product line concept is lacking specific approaches to develop safety critical products. Nonetheless, product lines are well-established concepts even in companies developing safety critical products. In this paper we present the results of an exploratory study interviewing 15 practitioners from 6 different companies. We identify typical challenges and approaches from industry and discuss their suitability. The challenges and approaches brought out by this study help us to identify and enhance applicable methods from the product line engineering domain that can meet the challenges in the safety critical domain as well.

Safe and efficient fleet operation for autonomous machines: an actor-based approach

In this paper, we formally model and verify run-time requirements of an application consisting of complex electrified machines called HX autonomous haulers, developed by Volvo Construction Equipment. To model the fleet control, we use Timed Rebeca, an actor-based modeling language, and to analyze the system performance, we use Afra, an integrated environment for modeling and verifying distributed systems modeled by Rebeca or Timed Rebeca language. We run a set of experiments to find the improved configuration in which the total time for machines to complete one operating cycle is minimized.

Graphical Approach for Modeling of Safety and Variability in Product Lines

Reuse of already developed parts and concepts is a common approach in industry to reduce the time to market and reduce the development efforts. Industrial product lines are often grown over time and structured approaches to support decision-making and manage the complexity are lacking. When developing safety-critical products through product lines, evidence must be provided for all possible product configurations. The lack of a structured product line approach taking the functional safety dimension into consideration makes it challenging for practitioners to provide the required evidence. In this paper we (1) identify requirements that a variability management approach will need to fulfill, (2) discuss existing approaches and their limitations, (3) propose potential extension, (4) apply our approach in an industrial use case and (5) discuss its applicability and future work.

Analyzing hazards in system-of-systems: Described in a quarry site automation context

Methods for analyzing hazards related to individual systems are well studied and established in industry today. When system-of-systems are set up to achieve new emergent behavior, hazards specifically caused by malfunctioning behavior of the complex interactions between the involved systems may not be revealed by just analyzing single system hazards. A structured process is required to reduce the complexity to enable identification of hazards when designing system-of-systems. In this paper we first present how hazards are identified and analyzed using hazard and risk assessment (HARA) methodology by the industry in the context of single systems. We describe systems-of-systems and provide a quarry site automation example from the construction equipment domain. We propose a new structured process for identifying potential hazards in systems-of-systems (HISoS), exemplified in the context of the provided example. Our approach helps to streamline the hazard analysis process in an efficient manner thus helping faster certification of system-of-systems.

Functional Safety in Product Lines -- A Systematic Mapping Study

Software product line engineering is a widely used approach to plan and manage reuse of software. When safety critical products are developed, achieving functional safety standard compliance must be shown. The requirements stated in the functional safety standards also apply when safety critical products are developed in product lines. Managing functional safety in industrial product lines is challenging and work around solutions are applied in practice. The objective of this research is to collect and review reported research publications focusing on achieving safety in product lines and to identify gaps in todays research. We conduct a systematic mapping study of research publications reported until January 2016. We identify 39 research articles to be included in a list of primary studies and analyze how product lines are documented, which safety-related topics are covered and which evaluation method the studies apply. Generally, we find that the area of how to achieve functional safety in product lines needs more attention. Our study provides an overview on which topics have been discussed until now and which safety-related topics need more attention.