Methods for Modeling of Product Lines for Safety-critical Systems

Abstract: Software product line engineering is a proposed methodology that enables software products and software-intensive systems to be developed at lower cost, higher quality and less time to market. The structured and managed artifacts reuse among different products in development is the main target of software product line engineering. As a key-method of the product line engineering approach, the commonality and variability analysis is a technique that identifies the potential artifacts for reuse. But the reuse poses challenges for delivering safety-critical products from the product line and achieving product line functional safety. In order to analyze the product line and provide more valuable information for its safety analysis, we make use of established product line modeling techniques, which model the product line commonality and variability from different perspectives. In this report, we investigate the product line modeling techniques. The product modeling analysis process covers two aspects: 1. Study different product line modeling techniques and find the ones suitable for product line modeling. We choose the modeling techniques that can be implemented to discuss in detail. 2. We implement the industrial wheel loader product line with two modeling techniques. Comprehensive models and detailed modeling process explanation are presented. The product line functional safety analysis covers three aspects: 1. Investigate the different safety analysis techniques and choose the fault tree analysis as the main technique. 2. Extend the single system fault tree to the product line fault tree. 3. Investigate the contributions of the product line modeling techniques to the product line functional safety analysis. Specifically, we map the product line models to the product line fault tree. Furthermore, we evaluate the product line modeling techniques from their performance in domain analysis and safety analysis.