Towards Reuse in Safety Risk Analysis Based on Product Line Requirements

Risk analysis and requirements engineering for safety-critical systems are expensive and challenging, especially for the very high reliability required, e.g., in the automotive and railway industries. Currently, risk analysis is performed by safety engineers with little or no explicit reuse. Of course, these engineers build on their previous experience in this course, but explicit reuse of related artefacts, e.g., from a dedicated repository is not available according to our best knowledge. The key idea of our approach is reuse in risk analysis based on development and look-up of a repository built around product line requirements. We propose explicit reuse of related artefacts from previous risk analyses, such as information on failures, hazards and safety-related risks. Our assumption is that the risk analysis of a new product of the product line can utilize this information from similar existing products, if available. Therefore, we plan to build a repository of such artefacts and to facilitate its look-up in the course of doing risk analysis. Our innovative approach to extend product-line technology has the expected result of substantially less expensive development of safety-critical systems and shorter time-to-market in such domains through reuse of existing risk-analysis artefacts.