Lessons Learned from Model-Based Safety Assessment with SysML and Component Fault Trees

Mastering the complexity of safety assurance for modern, software-intensive systems is challenging in several domains, such as automotive, robotics, and avionics. Model-based safety analysis techniques show promising results to handle this challenge by automating the generation of required artifacts for an assurance case. In this work, we adapt prominent approaches and propose facilitation of SysML models with component fault trees (CFTs) to support the fault tree analysis (FTA). While most existing approaches based on CFTs are only targeting the system topology, e. g., UML Class Diagrams, we propose an integration of CFTs with SysML Internal Block Diagrams as well as SysML Activity Diagrams. We conclude with best practices and lessons learned that emerged from applying our approach to automotive use-cases.