Variability Management in Safety-Critical Software Product Line Engineering

Safety-critical systems developed upon SPLE approach have to address safety standards, which establish guidance for analyzing and demonstrating dependability properties of the system at different levels of abstraction. However, the adoption of an SPLE approach for developing safety-critical systems demands the integration of safety engineering into SPLE processes. Thus, variability management in both system design and dependability analysis should be considered through SPLE life-cycle. Variation in design and context may impact on dependability properties during Hazard Analysis and Risk Assessment (HARA), allocation of functional and non-functional safety requirements, and component fault analysis. This paper presents DEPendable-SPLE, a model-based approach that extends traditional SPLE methods, to support variability modeling/management in dependability analysis. The approach is illustrated in a case study from the aerospace domain. As a result, the approach enabled efficient management of the impact of design and context variations on HARA and component fault modeling.