Modeling Concepts for Safety-Related Requirements in Sociotechnical Systems

In this paper we focus on modeling concepts for safety-critical sociotechnical systems. First we claim that there is a great need for model-based reasoning about sociotechnical safety-critical requirements in system design and management. After this we take our starting point from formal methods, requirements engineering, and software architecture. We provide special extensions for these methods which are well-suited for the special challenges of sociotechnical systems: structural dynamism, uncertainty and the behavioral relevance of cognitive parameters. We maintain the visual style of modeling concepts as known from software architecture and provide an easy to use notation for reasoning about the features of specific decision situations. Finally we provide concepts to deal with adaptive system behavior and human error.