Synthesis of diagnostic techniques based on an IEC 61508-aware metamodel

Abstract

Safety standards, such as IEC 61508, play an important role in assuring the safety of embedded systems. Since model-driven development (MDD) is also gaining importance in the development process of these systems, an integration of the standards with existing modeling theory is promising. However, one of the basic building blocks of MDD, the metamodels, have not been made “standard-aware” yet. This paper presents a first step of such an integration by using a standard-aware meta-model to synthesize diagnostic techniques. This is an important task, because the correct selection and implementation of these techniques is traditionally a manual, labor-intensive task. The necessary steps of such an integration are discussed, including the definition of the metamodel, the formulation of an algorithm to select the right diagnostic techniques, and the implementation of code generation.