• Title/Summary/Keyword: safety critical software

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POSSIBILITIES AND LIMITATIONS OF APPLYING SOFTWARE RELIABILITY GROWTH MODELS TO SAFETY-CRITICAL SOFTWARE

  • Kim, Man-Cheol;Jang, Seung-Cheol;Ha, Jae-Joo
    • Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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    • v.39 no.2
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    • pp.129-132
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    • 2007
  • It is generally known that software reliability growth models such as the Jelinski-Moranda model and the Goel-Okumoto's non-homogeneous Poisson process (NHPP) model cannot be applied to safety-critical software due to a lack of software failure data. In this paper, by applying two of the most widely known software reliability growth models to sample software failure data, we demonstrate the possibility of using the software reliability growth models to prove the high reliability of safety-critical software. The high sensitivity of a piece of software's reliability to software failure data, as well as a lack of sufficient software failure data, is also identified as a possible limitation when applying the software reliability growth models to safety-critical software.

A Study of Software Hazard Analysis for Safety Critical Function in Military Aircraft

  • Oh, Hung-Jae;Hong, Jin-Pyo
    • Journal of IKEEE
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    • v.16 no.2
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    • pp.145-152
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    • 2012
  • This paper is the Software Hazard Analysis (SWHA) which will study the managerial process and the technical methode and techniques inherent in the performance of software safety task within the Military Aircraft System Safety program. This SWHA identifies potential hazardous effects on the software intensive systems and provides a comprehensive and qualitative assessment of the software safety. The purpose of this paper is to identify safety critical functions of software in Military A/C. The identified software hazards associated with the design or function will be evaluated for risks and operational constraint to further improve the software design requirement, analysis and testing efforts for safety critical software. This common SWHA, the first time analysis in KOREA, was review all avionics OFP(Operational Flight Program), and focus only on software segments which are safety critical. This paper provides a important understanding between the customer and developer as to how the software safety for the Military A/C will be accomplished. It will also provide the current best solution which may as one consider the necessary step in establishing a credible and cost-effective software safety program.

Quantitative Reliability Assessment for Safety Critical System Software

  • Chung, Dae-Won
    • Journal of Electrical Engineering and Technology
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    • v.2 no.3
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    • pp.386-390
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    • 2007
  • At recent times, an essential issue in the replacement of the old analogue I&C to computer-based digital systems in nuclear power plants becomes the quantitative software reliability assessment. Software reliability models have been successfully applied to many industrial applications, but have the unfortunate drawback of requiring data from which one can formulate a model. Software that is developed for safety critical applications is frequently unable to produce such data for at least two reasons. First, the software is frequently one-of-a-kind, and second, it rarely fails. Safety critical software is normally expected to pass every unit test producing precious little failure data. The basic premise of the rare events approach is that well-tested software does not fail under normal routine and input signals, which means that failures must be triggered by unusual input data and computer states. The failure data found under the reasonable testing cases and testing time for these conditions should be considered for the quantitative reliability assessment. We presented the quantitative reliability assessment methodology of safety critical software for rare failure cases in this paper.

A Software Engineering Process for Safety-critical Software Application (Safety-critical 소프트웨어 적용을 위한 소프트웨어 개발 절차)

  • Kang, Byung-Heon;Kim, Hang-Bae;Chang, Hoon-Seon;Jeon, Jong-Sun;Park, Suk-Joon
    • Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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    • v.27 no.1
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    • pp.84-95
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    • 1995
  • Application of computer software to safety-critical systems is on the increase. To be successful, the software must be designed and constructed to meet the functional and performance requirements of the system. For safety reason, the software must be demonstrated not only to meet these requirements, but also to operate safely as a component within the system. For longer-term cost consideration, the software must be designed and structured to ease future maintenance and modifications. This paper present a software engineering process for the production of safety-critical software for a nuclear power plant The presentation is expository in nature of a viable high quality safety-critical software development. It is based on the ideas of a rational design process and on the experience of the adaptation of such process in the production of the safety-critical software for the Shutdown System Number Two of Wolsong 2, 3 & 4 nuclear power generation plants. This process is significantly different from a conventional process in terms of rigorous software development phases and software design techniques. The process covers documentation, design, verification and testing using mathematically precise notations and highly reviewable tabular format to specify software requirements and software design. These specifications allow rigorous, stepwise verification of software design against software requirements, and code against software design using static analysis. The software engineering process described in this paper applies the principle of information-hiding decomposition in software design using a modular design technique so that when a change is' required or an error is detected, the affected scope can be readily and confidently located. It also facilitates a sense of high degree of confidence in the ‘correctness’ of the software production, and provides a relatively simple and straightforward code implementation effort.

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A Study on the Software Fault Modes and Effect Analysis for Software Safety Evaluation (소프트웨어 안전성 평가를 위한 소프트웨어 고장 유형과 영향 분석에 관한 연구)

  • Kim, Myong-Hee;Park, Man-Gon
    • Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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    • v.15 no.1
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    • pp.115-130
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    • 2012
  • These days, most of safety-critical systems, which are systems those failures or malfunction may result in death or serious injury to people, or loss or severe damage to social systems, or environmental harm, are being built of embedded software or loaded controlling software systems on computers, electrical and electronic components or devices. There are a lot kind of fault analysis methods to evaluate safety of the safety-critical systems equipped computers, electrical and electronic components or devices with software. However, the only assessment method to evaluate software safety of a safety-critical system is not enough to analysis properly on account of the various types and characteristic of software systems by progress of information technology. Therefore, this paper proposes the integrated evaluation method and carries out a case study for the software safety of safety-critical system which embedded or loaded software sizes are small and control response times are not sensitive by use of two security analysis methods which are Fault Tree Analysis (FTA) and Fault Modes and Effect Analysis (FMEA) for ubiquitous healthcare system.

A Study for Evaluation Method of Safety Critical Software in Avionics Industry (안전필수 항공 산업용 소프트웨어 평가 방법 연구)

  • Lee, Hongseok;Kwon, Goohoon;Ko, Byeonggak
    • Journal of Advanced Navigation Technology
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    • v.19 no.2
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    • pp.91-97
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    • 2015
  • This paper specifies several considerations about assessing safety-critical software in the aerospace domain. In order to evaluate safety critical software in the aerospace industry, it is required to identify an information of evaluation criteria of software under evaluation. The information is specified in the standard, but determination of evaluation criteria cannot be decided by itself and depends on the results of safety assessment of a system and system design. Thus, this paper explains required information of system development standard and safety assessment standard to determine software evaluation criteria. It surveys existing methodologies about evaluating software, and suggests method which is adapted to evaluation of an advanced surface movement guidance and control system (A-SMGCS) software.

The Software Verification and Validation Tasks for a Safety Critical System in Nuclear Power Plants

  • Cheon Se Woo;Cha Kyung Ho;Kwon Kee Choon
    • International Journal of Safety
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    • v.3 no.1
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    • pp.38-46
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    • 2004
  • This paper introduces the software life-cycle V&V (verification and validation) tasks for the KNICS (Korea nuclear instrumentation and control system) project. The objectives of the V&V tasks are mainly to develop a programmable logic controller (PLC) for safety critical instrumentation and control (I&C) systems, and then to apply the PLC to developing the prototype of an engineered safety features-component control system (ESF-CCS) in nuclear power plants. As preparative works for the software V&V, various kinds of software plans and V&V task procedures have been developed according to the software life-cycle management. A number of software V&V tools have been adopted or developed to efficiently support the V&V tasks. The V&V techniques employed in this work include a checklist-based review and inspection, a requirement traceability analysis, formal verification, and life-cycle based software testing.

Development of Safety Criteria for Railway Safety Critical Software (철도 안전필수 소프트웨어를 위한 안전기준 도출)

  • Joung, Eui-Jin;Shin, Kyung-Ho
    • Proceedings of the KIEE Conference
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    • 2007.07a
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    • pp.1201-1202
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    • 2007
  • Safety critical systems are those in which a failure can have serious and irreversible consequences. Nowadays digital technology has been rapidly applied to critical system such as railways, airplanes, nuclear power plants, vehicles. The main difference between analog system and digital system is that the software is the key component of the digital system. The digital system performs more varying and highly complex functions efficiently compared to the existing analog system because software can be flexibly designed and implemented. The flexible design make it difficult to predict the software failures. This paper reviews safety standard and criteria for safety critical system such as railway system and introduces the framework for the software lifecycle. The licensing procedure for the railway software is also reviewed.

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RISKY MODULE PREDICTION FOR NUCLEAR I&C SOFTWARE

  • Kim, Young-Mi;Kim, Hyeon-Soo
    • Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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    • v.44 no.6
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    • pp.663-672
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    • 2012
  • As software based digital I&C (Instrumentation and Control) systems are used more prevalently in nuclear plants, enhancement of software dependability has become an important issue in the area of nuclear I&C systems. Critical attributes of software dependability are safety and reliability. These attributes are tightly related to software failures caused by faults. Software testing and V&V (Verification and Validation) activities are hence important for enhancing software dependability. If the risky modules of safety-critical software can be predicted, it will be possible to focus on testing and V&V activities more efficiently and effectively. It should also make it possible to better allocate resources for regulation activities. We propose a prediction technique to estimate risky software modules by adopting machine learning models based on software complexity metrics. An empirical study with various machine learning algorithms was executed for comparing the prediction performance. Experimental results show SVMs (Support Vector Machines) perform as well or better than the other methods.

A Comparative Study of Formal Methods for Safety Critical Software in Nuclear Power Plant

  • Sedo Sohn;Seong, Poong-Hyun
    • Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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    • v.32 no.6
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    • pp.537-548
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    • 2000
  • The requirement of ultra high reliability of the safety critical software can not be demonstrated by testing alone. The specification based on formal method is recommended for safety system software. But there exist various kinds of formal methods, and this variety of formal method is recognized as an obstacle to the wide use of formal method. In this paper six different formal method have been applied to the same part of the functional requirements that is calculation algorithm intensive. The specification results were compared against the criteria that is derived from the characteristics that good software requirements specifications should have and regulatory body recommends to have. The application experience shows that the critical characteristics should be defined first, then appropriate method has to be selected. In our case, the Software Cost Reduction method was recommended for internal condition or calculation algorithm checking, and statechart method is recommended for the external behavioral description.

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