A Hazard Modeling Language for Safety-Critical Systems Based on the Hazard Ontology

Preliminary hazard analysis (PHA) is a key safety concerned activity to identify potential hazards. However, since various stakeholders will be involved in the identification process, a common understanding of the nature of hazards among stakeholders, such as what a hazard consists of and how to describe it without ambiguities, is of crucial importance to achieve the goal of PHA. In this work, we propose a hazard modeling language (HML) based on a domain ontology to facilitate the specification of identified hazards. In addition, we present an approach to guide the transformation from natural language hazard descriptions into the HML specification. Finally, an industrial PHA example is used to illustrate the usefulness of our work.