Safety Perspective for Supporting Architectural Design of Safety-Critical Systems

Various software architecture viewpoint approaches have been introduced to model the architecture views for stakeholder concerns. To address quality concerns in software architecture views, an important approach is to define architectural perspectives that include a collection of activities, tactics and guidelines that require consideration across a number of the architectural views. Several architectural perspectives have been defined for selected quality concerns. In this paper we propose the Safety Perspective that is dedicated to ensure that the safety concern is properly addressed in the architecture views. The proposed safety perspective can assist the system and software architects in designing, analyzing and communicating the decisions regarding safety concerns. We illustrate the safety perspective for a real industrial case study and discuss the lessons learned.