Tools for Safety

Traditionally, safety engineers have relied on text-/table-based solutions for the documentation of artifacts created during the development lifecycle. However, due to the increasing complexity of today's safety-critical embedded systems, these solutions do not scale properly and new approaches for development and documentation are required.

Fraunhofer IESE addresses this challenge by researching and developing integrated model-based safety engineering approaches, with a strong focus on architecture integration, traceability, reusability, and maintainability of safety-relevant artifacts. Under the umbrella of safeTbox we extend state of the art UML/SysML modeling tools (Enterprise Architect and MagicDraw) with respect to methods and techniques from the field of safety engineering. The selection thereby ranges from methods and techniques from the state of the practice (e.g. FMEA, FTA, GSN) over state of the art (CFT, C²FT) to research (e.g. ConSerts, FMEVA, security-enhanced fault trees).

The model-based tool framework safeTbox has been conceived and implemented with the aim of supporting safety engineers in their typical activities:

• Definition of the system architecture (SysML, SPES framework)
• Hazard and risk assessment (According to ISO 26262, ARP 4761)
• Definition of safety concepts
• Qualitative and quantitative safety analysis, failure logic modeling
• Construction of safety cases

These activities are supported by numerous state of the practice and state of the art methods and techniques (such as FMEA, FTA, C²FT, GSN, etc.) which have been implemented in a model-based way. safeTbox provides a tight integration between the resulting artefacts (i.e. models) which enables good traceability and comprehensive analysis opportunities. Enterprise Architect from Sparks Systems has been chosen as tooling platform for the main version of safeTbox due to its popularity and its excellent extension mechanisms and tailoring possibilities. However, there are also alternative (partially less advanced) implementations on other platforms.

Visit the safeTbox website.

Besides the implementation for Enterprise Architect, we also have good experience with the extension of other UML modeling tools. Our second most highly developed version of the safeTbox framework has been realized as an extension of the Magic Draw tool from NoMagic.

If you are interested in the Magic Draw version or if you would like to implement safeTbox in your own tool chain, please don’t hesitate to contact us.