A general framework for applying safety analysis to safety critical real-time applications using fault trees

The paper presents a general framework for analyzing the safety aspects of complex safety critical real-time applications. The proposed framework is based on the well-established fault tree analysis (FTA) technique and provides a systematic way for handling fault trees, as, well as, discovering any hazardous conditions that may arise. It also provides the background for the development of automated software safety analysis tools oriented to a broad set of programming languages or specification/design notations for, which fault tree templates are (or will be) available. Such a tool can be used to assess software safety at most phases of software life cycle. The paper presents the SAFELAND tool which follows framework disciplines and performs code-based fault tree analysis on safety critical real-time applications written in several idioms of the C programming language