The qSafe Project – Developing a Tool for Current Practice in Functional Safety Analysis

Functional safety analysis (FSA), that is checking whether a designed artifact will perform safely even under the presence of failing components, has gained significant importance in different areas, including aeronautic and automotive systems. The same applies to failure-modes-and-effects analysis (FMEA) and fault-tree analysis (FTA) as the major contributing processes. FSA is labor- and time-consuming as well as errorprone, and would benefit from computer-based tool-support. Work on qualitative model-based systems has developed principled solutions, particularly to FMEA, but did not achieve the step to industrial practice. Rather than novel technical contributions, this paper discusses reasons for this fact and describes the qSafe* project, which aims at overcoming the obstacles and at making a major step towards producing tools that can support current practice.