Automatic Generation of Fault Trees from AADL Models

1Safety-critical systems, such as avionics systems and medical devices, are developed with stringent safety re-quirements. System safety analysis provides assurance that the system satisfies these safety constraints. Traditionally, safety analyses are performed manually based on various informal requirements and design documents. Much recent work has investigated automating system safety analyses using formal error models linked to system specifications. This integrated methodology holds promise in making the safety analysis process more formal, automated, consistent, and most importantly in helping tightly integrate the safety and systems engineering processes. This paper extends our soon to appear publication [10] which describes our pro-totype tool for automatically generating static fault trees based on architectural AADL models that can be input into a commercial fault tree analysis tool, CAFTA. This paper adds more related work and further discusses the couplings among model level semantics and expressiveness, charac-teristics of an intermediate representation, and underlying mathematical solution techniques that produce the analysis results. 1