The Parameterized Safety Requirements Templates

Abstract

Despite imposing strict recommendations to be considered during the specification of safety requirements, standards and regulations do not provide guidance to be used throughout the creation of these artifacts. In practice, each safety requirement specification has heterogeneous structures, usually based on the experience of the engineers involved in the specification process. Consequently, it becomes difficult to ensure that the standards' recommendations were considered, such as the existence of evidences that the requirements are properly traceable to other development artifacts such as architecture and failure propagation models. To address this challenge, we defined the Parameterized Safety Requirements Templates, which is a controlled natural language based approach to support engineers in elaborating the content description of safety requirements specifications, ensuring that elements of the architectural design and of the failure propagation models are explicitly considered throughout the textual description of the safety requirements, and are therefore properly traced. The Parameterized Safety Requirements Templates have been used in different domains such as automotive, avionics, and medical devices, and have proven to be effective in improving artifact traceability. In this paper, we present their usage in the context of an industrial Automated External Defibrillator system.