Product Line Analysis and the System Safety Process

摘要

Product lines (groups of highly similar products) have recently received a great deal of attention in the softwareengineering community, and especially in organisations that develop products that contain embedded software. Theproduct-line concept provides a constrained production environment that facilitates change and reuse between membersof the product line. The reported successes of the last few years concentrate on the embedded software product, but dolittle to address the wider issues of integrated systems engineering, and certainly do not address the safety process.We believe that there is an enormous benefit to be gained by applying the successful disciplines of software product-lineengineering to the system safety process. The results thus far indicate that these techniques can help in enhancing thecompleteness and robustness of a product line’s safety-related requirements. This paper focuses on the phases of thesystem safety process that affect system requirements.