Challenges for Reuse in a Safety-Critical Context: A State-of-Practice Study

The need for cost efficient development and shorter time to market requires reuse of safety-critical embedded systems. One main challenge for reuse approaches in a safety-critical context is to provide evidence that assumptions of the safety artifacts for the reused component are still valid in the new system definition. This paper summarizes the major findings from an explorative study conducted in order to identify the state of practice of reuse in the context of different functional safety standards. The explorative study consists of a set of questions, which have been discussed with interviewees from companies of various domains. The companies act in safety-critical domains with diverse product portfolios. We covered several points of view by interviewing persons with different background. The results of the study reveal industrial challenges, which built the input for the derivation of possible future work based on the identified practical needs. Our main findings show the current predominance of ad-hoc reuse techniques and the need for more systematic approaches for reuse. We propose a systematic approach to cover the industrial challenges: establishing a safety culture in the company, an integrated system and safety development process, the introduction of model-based development for an improved support of reuse concepts, and metrics for impact analysis.