Ontology-Based Model Driven Engineering for Safety Verification

Safety assessment of dependable systems is a complex verification task that is desirable to be explicitly incorporated into the development cycle during the very early stages of a project. The main reason is that the cost to correct a safety error at the late stages of system development is excessively high. Towards this aim, we introduce an ontology-based model-driven engineering process for automating transformations of models that are utilized as reusable artifacts. The logical and syntactical structures of the design and safety models have to conform to a number of metamodel constraints. These constraints are semantically represented by mapping them onto an OWL domain ontology, allowing the incorporation of a Description Logic OWL reasoner and inference rules, in order to detect lacks of model elements and semantically inconsistent parts. Model validation throughout the ontology-based transformation assures that the generated formal safety model fulfils a series of requirements that render it analyzable. Our approach has been implemented as a response to an industrial problem, where the architecture design is expressed in Architecture Analysis and Design Language (AADL) and safety models are specified in the AltaRica formal language.