Process and tool support for design patterns with safety requirements

Abstract

The requirement for higher Security and Dependability (S&D) of systems is continuously increasing, even in domains tradi-tionally not deeply involved in such issues. Nowadays, many practitioners express their worries about current S&D software engineering practices. New recommendations should be considered to ground this discipline on two pillars: solid theory and proven principles. We took the second pillar towards software engineering for embedded system applications, focusing on the problem of integrating S&D by design to foster reuse. In this paper, we propose to combine design patterns and Model Driven Engineering (MDE) techniques for building component-based applications with safety requirements. The resulting modeling framework serves primarily to capture the basic concepts for specifying safety-oriented design patterns, building an S&D pattern system, and maintain safety properties, with existing modeling artifacts, during the engineering process based on the S&D pattern system. As a proof of concept, we are evaluating the feasibility of the framework through the example of the MooN pattern system for building systems having safety requirements: Communication Based Train Control (CBTC).