Requirements Engineering for Safety Critical Systems: An Approach for Avionic Systems

Safety critical software systems are defined to be those systems that should unanticipated failure occur, there could be the harm to life or property. All software life-cycle development methodologies place emphasis on the requirements elicitation and analysis, as this is the most crucial phase of the development life-cycle. This is because many system failures have their genesis at the point of requirements definition and analysis. Avionic software system development is an important and expanding area of work. There are universally established specifications for software development in avionics, which have been recently updated. The work that is presented in this paper, describes a research effort for defining a model-based software development life-cycle for avionic software system development that is based on a universally accepted specification standard, and focused on the requirements capture and modeling phase of the life-cycle.