SOFTWARE SAFETY ANALYSIS IN DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS

In many everyday applications, software systems have to cope with faults and failures to avoid disastrous results. Several techniques have been proposed for analysing software safety, but very few of them deal with distributed systems. In this paper a new software safety analysis approach for distributed systems is presented, based on a technique called component message fault analysis. This technique checks the safety-critical logic using the safety specification for different categories of component fault events, to uncover ambiguous safety requirements or design deficiencies. To demonstrate the power of this technique, a dual-purpose missile system is introduced and analysed with regard to its software safety requirements.