An Architecture-centric Approach to Safety Critical Software Product Lines

Safety-critical software is increasingly integrated into everyday life. We depend on software for automation, such as medical monitoring, and we increasingly rely on software to make decisions in high-risk, safety-critical scenarios where there may not be enough time to alert humans, such as autonomous vehicle navigation. Traditional methods for creating safety-critical software are expensive, time-consuming and not suitable for consumer products. Software product line techniques have proven successful at reducing the cost and the time of creating and deploying traditional products. This paper presents a proposal for an investigation on conducting safety analysis in safety-critical software product lines using an architecture approach.