A State-based Extension to STPA for Safety-Critical System-of-Systems

Automation of earth moving machinery enables improving existing production workflows in various applications like surface mines, material handling operations or material transporting. Such connected and collaborating autonomous machines can be seen as a system-of-systems. It is not yet clear how to consider safety during the development of such system-of-systems (SoS). One potentially useful approach to analyze the safety for complex systems is the System Theoretic Process Analysis (STPA). However, STPA is essentially suitable to static monolithic systems and lacks the ability to deal with emergent and dysfunctional behaviors in the case of SoS. These behaviors if not identified could potentially lead to hazards and it is important to provide mechanisms for SoS developers/integrators to capture such critical situations. In this paper, we present an approach for enriching STPA to provide the ability to check whether the distributed constituent systems of a SoS have a consistent perspective of the global state which is necessary to ensure safety. In other words, these checks must be capable at least to identify and highlight inconsistencies that can lead to critical situations. We describe the above approach by taking a specific case of state change related issues that could potentially be missed by STPA by looking at an industrial case. By applying Petri nets, we show that possible critical situations related to state changes are not identified by STPA. In this context we also propose a model-based extension to STPA and show how our new process could function in tandem with STPA.