Assuring Safety for Component Based Software Engineering

Developing Safety-Critical Systems (SCS) is an expensive activity largely due to the cost of testing both components and the systems produced by integrating them. In more mainstream system design, Model-Based Development (MBD) and Component-Based Software Engineering (CBSE) are seen as complementary activities that can reduce these costs, however their use is not yet well supported in the safety critical domain, as safety is an emergent property. The contributions of this paper are to describe some of the challenges of using these approaches in SCS, and then argue how through appropriate safety argument patterns the challenges can be addressed.