Component-wise software certification for safety-critical embedded devices

The development of industrial software systems increasingly requires safety certification. The certification process causes huge efforts and has to be repeatedly executed for changes of the systems. At the same time, many of the software architectures are developed in a component-based style. This paper presents the results of an industrial software development and certification project in the railway domain. It is a component-based development project that was designed to be certifiable in two steps with this new approach. First, the core of the system will be developed and certified. Secondly, new or adapted plug-in components will be certified individually. Thus, the re-certification effort is reduced to the certification effort of a single component.