Directions towards supporting synergies between Design and Probabilistic Safety Assessment Activities: illustration on a Fire detection system embedded in a helicopter

International audienceThe complexity of modern critical systems is growing rapidly while the industry is submitted to more and more pressure for reducing costs and time-to-market. Traditional development methods " in disciplinary silos " used to design and analyze such complex systems are reaching their limits. RAMS engineers face more and more difficulties to satisfy demands of reliability evaluation especially at early stages of system design. In this context we offer to take advantage of Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) approaches to reduce construction time of reliability models and improve their consistency with system models. Model-Driven Engineering is a promising approach used to develop and analyze complex systems from different domains. In this paper, we exploit MDE to support PSA analysis and illustrate the approach on a case study from avionics industry. This experimentation has enabled the suggestion of a seamless methodology to support iterative Probabilistic Safety Analysis, thus improving the cooperation with system designers