Life, Safety & Mission Critical
Notorious and tragic systems failures such as the 1986 Challenger Shuttle painfully reinforce the consequences of failures in systems characterized as safety-critical or life-critical. Unlike business, commercial, and entertainment systems, these systems affect not just the senses and finances of humans but their physical well-being as well and, as such, have significant death potential. The stakeholders of such systems—purchasers, owners, users, auditors, designers, and engineers need to assure that these systems are correctly specified, perform as specified, perform only as specified, and degrade gracefully with minimized human harm.
Safety-critical Systems Engineers rely on several methodologies, methods, and process artifacts to specify and implement these systems and to verify and demonstrate that these systems conform to their constraints. Methodologies and specifications include DO-178 for US Commercial Aviation Systems, Part 571 FMVSS for US Automotive Systems, and FDA 21 CFR for Medical Systems. Methods include Effective and Frequent Collaboration, Requirements Specifications and Engineering, ISO and CMMI Process Maturity, Documentation, Formal Methods, Model-based Systems Engineering, Model-Driven Architecture, Reliability Analysis such as Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA), Simulations, and Verification and Validation. Artefacts include: Specifications, Requirements Capture Databases, Workflow and Process Milestone Forms, Documentations, Traceability Reports, Models, Test Cases, Simulation Results, and Verification Reports.
Artisan Studio capabilities for collaboration, Model-based Systems Engineering, Requirements Management, Document Generation, Simulation and MDA greatly assist in specifying, auditing, implementing, and verifying safety-critical systems and supporting the relevant specifications, methodologies, and methods. Additionally, the extensibility capabilities of Artisan Studio have been utilized by Artisan Software to integrate these capabilities with primary Systems Engineering tools in the industry such as: Telelogic DOORS, Geensys Reqtify, Microsoft Office, and Mathworks Matlab/Simulink.
Artisan Studio’s MDA capabilities such as ACS/TDK are used to implement software code generators for languages such as Ada and Praxis High Integrity System’s SPARK-Ada. The language Ada and its safety-critical subsets has long been recognized as the best available language for the implementation of safety-constrained, resource-constrained systems. Artisan Studio has demonstrated the effectiveness of utilizing UML in complex, life and safety critical applications.
For more details download the ACS/TDK – Data Sheet.
