Failure and Change Impact Analysis for Safety-Critical Systems

Nowadays, safety-critical systems are used in various domains including Internet of Things of medical devices. However, such systems are usually very complex and fault-prone. This means, safety, security and real-time aspects are often only insufficiently considered. To mitigate or avoid safety-critical failures, it is mandatory to analyze effects by means of a failure and change impact analysis. In this paper, we propose an approach to analyze a hierarchical structured model to determine critical goals. Afterwards, the effects and impacts of failures are calculated and determined to identify components which have a need of counter measures. Furthermore, it is analyzed which kind of effects these counter measures will have within the hierarchical model. Finally, the developed approach is evaluated by means of a realistic medical use case.