Combining safety engineering and product line engineering

Abstract

Product line engineering and safety engineering for software address current challenges in the development of software-intensive, safety-critical embedded systems. The two engineering disciplines have different goals and the approaches for achieving these goals have been created independently from each other. For this reason traditional safety engineering methods do not fit to traditional methods for software product line engineering. The reasearch project "Safe ReSA (Safe Reusable Safety Artifacts)" between the Fraunhofer IESE and Siemens AG has the goal to extend traditional safety engineering methods so that safety engineering can be applied to the reusable artifacts that are created in product line engineering. Sequentially, we present how we extended methods for analyzing cause-effect relation between failures, for developing a safety concept and a safety case. Additionally, we present lessons learned from industry projects and our tool for applying the extended methods to complex real world systems.