Using Safety Contracts to Guide the Integration of Reusable Safety Elements within ISO 26262

Safety-critical systems usually need to comply with a domain-specific safety standard. To reduce the cost and time needed to achieve the standard compliance, reuse of safety-relevant components is not sufficient without the reuse of the accompanying artefacts. Developing reusable safety components out-of-context of a particular system is challenging, as safety is a system property, hence support is needed to capture and validate the context assumptions before integration of the reusable component and its artefacts in-context of the particular system. We have previously developed a concept of strong and weak safety contracts to facilitate systematic reuse of safety-relevant components and their accompanying artefacts. In this work we define a safety contracts development process and provide guidelines to bridge the gap between reuse of safety elements developed out-of-context of a particular system and their integration in the ISO 26262 safety standard. We use a real-world case for demonstration of the process.