Deriving Safety Contracts to Support Architecture Design of Safety Critical Systems

The use of contracts to enhance the maintainability of safety-critical systems has received a significant amount of research effort in recent years. However some key issues have been identified: the difficulty in dealing with the wide range of properties of systems and deriving contracts to capture those properties, and the challenge of dealing with the inevitable incompleteness of the contracts. In this paper, we explore how the derivation of contracts can be performed based on the results of failure analysis. We use the concept of safety kernels to alleviate the issues. Firstly the safety kernel means that the properties of the system that we may wish to manage can be dealt with at a more abstract level, reducing the challenges of representation and completeness of the "safety" contracts. Secondly the set of safety contracts is reduced so it is possible to reason about their satisfaction in a more rigorous manner.