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Critical systems must comply with safety standards in many application domains. This involves gathering safety evidence in the form of artefacts such as safety analyses, system specifications, and testing results. These artefacts can evolve during a system’s lifecycle, and impact analysis might be necessary to guarantee that system safety and compliance are not jeopardised. Although extensive research has been conducted on impact analysis and on safety evidence management, the knowledge about how safety evidence change impact analysis is addressed in practice is limited. This technical report presents a survey targeted at filling this gap by analysing the circumstances under which safety evidence change impact analysis is addressed, the tool support used, and the challenges faced. We obtained 97 valid responses representing 16 application domains, 28 countries, and 47 safety standards. The results suggest that most projects deal with safety evidence change impact analysis during system development and mainly from system specifications, the level of automation in the process is low, and insufficient tool support is the most frequent challenge. Other notable findings are that safety case evolution should probably be better managed, no commercial impact analysis tool has been reported as used for all artefact types, and experience and automation do not seem to greatly help in avoiding challenges.

Software safety certification involves checking that the software design meets the (software) safety requirements. In practice, inspections are one of the primary vehicles for ensuring that safety requirements are satisfied by the design. Unless the safety-related aspects of the design are clearly delineated, the inspections conducted by safety assessors would have to consider the entire design, although only small fragments of the design may be related to safety. In a model-driven development context, this means that the assessors have to browse through large models, understand them, and identify the safety-related fragments. This is time-consuming and error-prone, specially noting that the assessors are often third-party regulatory bodies who were not involved in the design. To address this problem, we describe in this paper a prototype tool called, SafeSlice, that enables one to automatically extract the safety-related slices (fragments) of design models. The main enabler for our slicing technique is the traceability between the safety requirements and the design, established by following a structured design methodology that we propose. Our work is grounded on SysML, which is being increasingly used for expressing the design of safety-critical systems. We have validated our work through two case studies and a control experiment which we briefly outline in the paper.

Organizations are attracted to Java because the language has proven more economical than C and C++. Companies that have made the switch to Java typically find that they are twice as productive during development of new functionality and five to ten times as productive during reuse of existing code. Organizations that develop in Java also observe decreased software error rates, increased software reuse and longevity, and improved recruitment of competent developers. Special hard real-time Java development practices enable proofs of resource needs and determinism. Early analysis demonstrates that the hard real-time Java platform runs in less than a tenth the memory footprint and up to three times faster than traditional Java for typical hard real-time tasks. Determinism is on par with typical C code, offering more than a 20-fold improvement over the timing predictability of traditional Java.

This study first focuses on the quantitative evaluation of current indirect regulation on industrial machines and devices in Korea. Statistical analysis of industrial accidents reveals the fact that more efforts must be directed towards securing the essential safety of industrial machines and devices at manufacturing stage hence guaranteeing the effectiveness of the regulation. In order for the regulation to be further effective balanced direct regulation on both manufacturers and users of industrial machines and devices needs to be implemented. An example of such transition is also shown