Engineering safety information in software intensive systems

Safety is crucial for software intensive systems. Safety-related accidents have resulted in great losses of human, system, environment and mission. However, safety concept is far long to be correctly understood and adequately engineered. Safety is more of a social problem than a technical problem, which addresses social risks instead of solely technical hazards. In engineering practices, most of safety-related work has been done under traditional reliability assumptions and approaches. This mismatch results into incomplete and inconsistent information of system risks, which accounts more for system accidents than implementation errors. This paper investigates the overall system properties, such as the corresponding underlying strategy in man-made system design, the basic characters of software intensive systems, and component-based safety-driven system engineering for these systems. It provides a broader view for system safety, which also give specific consideration for mission safety to assure completeness and consistency in engineering. Through injecting component-based ideas and approaches into safety-driven system engineering, a new approached is designed to engineering safety information in software intensive systems. In the end, a case studied shows the process and attributes of the approach.