Towards the Use of Controlled Natural Languages in Hazard Analysis and Risk Assessment

Abstract

New safety-critical and software-controlled systems of automobiles have to be developed according to the functional safety standard ISO 26262. A hazard analysis and risk assessment has to be performed for such systems. The sub-activities of this analysis technique are defined by the standard, but informative definitions leave room for subjective variation, and documentation details are left to the car manufacturer. Usually, natural languages are used for the documentation, which are powerful and expressive but also complex and ambiguous. We propose the usage of controlled natural languages for the documentation of the results of the hazard analysis and risk assessment. In a first step, we developed a controlled natural language for the description of the hazardous events. The language reduces ambiguity and improves the consistency across hazard analyses and risk as- sessments.