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Systems engineering approaches use high-level models to capture the architecture and behavior of the system. However, when safety engineers conduct safety and reliability analysis, they have to create formal models, such as fault-trees, according to the behavior described by the high-level engineering models and environmental/fault assumptions. Instead of creating low-level analysis models, our approach builds on engineering models in safety analysis by exploiting the simulation capabilities of recent probabilistic programming and simulation advancements. Thus, it could be applied in accordance with standards and best practices for the analysis of a critical automotive system as part of an industrial collaboration, while leveraging high-level block diagrams and statechart models created by engineers. We demonstrate the applicability of our approach in a case study adapted from the automotive system from the collaboration., Comment: In Proceedings MARS 2020, arXiv:2004.12403

Executable models can be used to support all engineering activities in Model-Based Systems Engineering. Testing and simulation of such models can provide early feedback about design choices. How-ever, in today’s complex systems failures could arise due to subtle errors that are hard to find without checking all possible execution paths. Formal methods, and especially model checking can uncover such subtle errors, yet their usage in practice is limited due to the specialized expertise and high computing power required. There-fore we created an automated, cloud-based environment that can verify complex reachability properties on SysML State Machines using hidden model checkers. The approach and the prototype is illustrated using an example from the aerospace domain.