A Model-Driven Safety Certification Method for Process Compliance

A safety case is a contextualized structured argument constituted of process and product-based sub-arguments to show that a system is acceptably safe. The creation of a safety case is an extremely time-consuming and costly activity needed for certification purposes. To reduce time and cost, reuse as well as automatic generation possibilities represent urgent research directions. In this paper, we focus on safety processes mandated by prescriptive standards and we identify process-related structures from which process-based arguments (those aimed at showing that a required development process has been applied according to the standard) can be generated and more easily reused. Then, we propose a model-driven safety certification method to derive those arguments as goal structures given in Goal Structuring Notation from process models given in compliance with Software Process Engineering Meta-model 2.0. The method is illustrated by generating process-based arguments in the context of ISO 26262.