A Systematic Method for Identifying Safety-related Faults in Formal Specifications Using FTA

The potential hazard in the formal specification of safety-critical systems is likely to cause the failure of the corresponding system that may lead to a catastrophic disaster. How to accurately identify the hazard-related faults in software is still a difficult problem. In this paper, we propose a systematic method for detecting potential hazards in formal specifications using fault tree analysis. Using this approach to a given formal specification, a fault tree will be constructed based on the structure of the specification. We discuss the rules for constructing fault tree analysis that are established based on various structures of specifications. A case study is conducted to demonstrate how the proposed approach works in practice.