DECISIVE: Designing Critical Systems With Iterative Automated Safety Analysis

Systems safety is becoming increasingly challenging due to the presence of ever-more complex applications. Safety analysis is an important aspect of safety-critical systems engineering (SCSE) to discover problems in system design that can potentially lead to hazards with risks that may lead to accidents. Performing safety analysis requires significant manual effort—its automation has become the research focus in the critical system domain due to the increasing complexity of systems and the emergence of open adaptive systems. In this article, we propose a novel methodology in which automated safety analysis drives the design of safety-critical systems. We delve into the specifics of our approach and the supporting tools. Additionally, we discuss the method to integrate our approach into the current practice of SCSE. The experimental results reveal that the proposed approach with its supporting tool promotes the efficiency of safety analysis significantly, whilst maintaining high degrees of correctness, coverage and scalability.