ECSS - Efficient Certification of functional Safety for Software systems

Description of the project

The goal is to develop an efficient approach for development of software that is certifiable with respect to functional safety. To efficiently develop such software systems is today, without doubt, one of the greatest challenges for Swedish machine and automotive industry. Manufacturers are today under great pressure to certify their systems due to legislation, for example, the Machinery Directive, EU Directive 2006/42/EC, which comes into legal force from December 29, 2009. Certifying software systems with respect to functional safety requires qualitative evidence of compatibilty to a comprehensive development process, that extensive safety analysis have ben conducted, and that the safety related functions in the software have been tested in a convincing way - and these functions are often hard to test at all. In practice this implies that each line of source code becomes much more expensive to develop.

We are looking for an efficient development process that is compatible with the requirements of safety standards in combination with model-based and component-based strategies.