ATICA - MBSA Model Based Safety Analysis approach for aerospace systems

The ever-increasing demand for better, enhanced functionalities, combined with the advances of the technology, are motivating a dramatic escalation of the complexity of space and ground segment infrastructure. Furthermore, the competitiveness of the industry and the request by the main stakeholders of shorter lead times and time to market are introducing additional constraints in the design, validation, and production phases of space systems. Motivated by this context, manufacturers of space systems are refining and upgrading their design and production approaches; most of these enhancements being enabled by the increasing digitalization of processes and tools. The race to develop effective tools is going to be a turning point for organizations that know how to lead this change and integrate it effectively into their policies. Among these innovations, this paper brings attention to the verification process and, in particular, to safety and reliability analysis, a topic of capital importance for today's cyber-physical systems. We present ATICA, a Model Based Safety Analysis (MBSA) methodology and toolset that combines the Model Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) approach and a computer-aided framework for reliability and safety analysis. The proposed methodology improves the quality of the systems design thanks to the early and incremental verification of safety and reliability related requirements, while reducing the overall engineering effort.