Software architecture knowledge management for safety systems

Due to demands for flexibility, cost-efficiency and performance, also safety-related systems are nowadays implemented with software and programmable units as their central parts. In software development, one of the most important development phases affecting the quality of the final products is architecture design. However, related to architectures, many safety publications still focus on issues that are more important in traditional safety systems, e.g. redundancy. In this paper, we focus on architectures of safety systems by extending a general purpose architecture knowledge management (AKM) database with views and functions supporting safety system development. With the resulting AKM database, which is demonstrated with an example application, we foresee it possible to facilitate both the development and certification of safety systems.