Recent Advances towards the Industrial Application of Model-Driven Engineering for Assurance of Safety-Critical Systems

Safety-critical systems are typically subject to assurance processes as way to ensure that they do not pose undue risks to people, property, or the environment, usually in compliance with assurance standards. The planning, execution, and management of assurance processes can be a complex activity in practice because of issues in the application of the standards, the large amount of information to handle, and the need for providing convincing justifications of assurance adequacy, among other difficulties. As a solution, many authors have argued that the use of Model-Driven Engineering principles and techniques can facilitate and improve assurance of safety-critical systems. This paper presents some of the latest advances that have been and are being made towards the use of these principles and techniques in industry. Although models have been used for assurance of safety-critical systems for many years, e.g. to specify safety cases, it has only been recently when the full potential of Model-Driven Engineering has started to be more widely exploited. This includes aspects such as the specification of metamodels and domain specific languages for assurance, the extension and application of UML, and the use of model transformations.