Cost Optimisation in Certification of Software Product Lines

Safety-critical systems (such as those in automotive, avionics, railway domains), where a failure can result in accidents with fatal consequences, need to certify their products as per domain-specific safety standards. Safety certification is not only time consuming but also consumes the project budget. Adopting a reuse oriented development and certification paradigm can be highly beneficial in such systems. Though there had been several research efforts on cost models in the context of software reuse as well as software product lines, none of them have addressed the certification related costs. In this paper, we present a cost model for software product lines, which incorporates certification costs as well. We first propose a mathematical model to represent a Software Product Line and then present an approach to compute, using optimisation theory, the set of artifacts that compose a new product assuring an expected level of confidence (that is, a certain Safety Integrity Level) at an optimised cost level. The proposed approach can help developers and software project managers in making efficient design decisions in relation to the choice of the components for a new product variant development as part of a product line.