Using UML profiles for sector-specific tailoring of safety evidence information

Rajwinder Kaur Panesar-Walawege, Mehrdad Sabetzadeh, Lionel Briand

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract

Safety-critical systems are often subject to certification as a way to ensure that the safety risks associated with their use are sufficiently mitigated. A key requirement of certification is the provision of evidence that a system complies with the applicable standards. The way this is typically organized is to have a generic standard that sets forth the general evidence requirements across different industry sectors, and then to have a derived standard that specializes the generic standard according to the needs of a specific industry sector. To demonstrate standards compliance, one therefore needs to precisely specify how the evidence requirements of a sector-specific standard map onto those of the generic parent standard. Unfortunately, little research has been done to date on capturing the relationship between generic and sector-specific standards and a large fraction of the issues arising during certification can be traced to poorly-stated or implicit relationships between a generic standard and its sector-specific interpretation. In this paper, we propose an approach based on UML profiles to systematically capture how the evidence requirements of a generic standard are specialized in a particular domain. To demonstrate our approach, we apply it for tailoring IEC61508 - one of the most established standards for functional safety - to the Petroleum industry.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationConceptual Modeling, ER 2011 - 30th International Conference, Proceedings
Pages362-378
Number of pages17
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2011
Externally publishedYes
Event30th International Conference on Conceptual Modeling, ER 2011 - Brussels, Belgium
Duration: 31 Oct 20113 Nov 2011

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume6998 LNCS
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Conference

Conference30th International Conference on Conceptual Modeling, ER 2011
Country/TerritoryBelgium
CityBrussels
Period31/10/113/11/11

Keywords

  • Evidence Information Models
  • IEC61508
  • Safety Certification
  • UML Profiles

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