A System-Theoretic Safety Engineering Approach for Software-Intensive Systems

In the software development process, formal verification and functional testing are complementary approaches which are used to verify the functional correctness of software; however, even perfectly reliable software could lead to an accident. The correctness of software cannot ensure the safe operation of safety-critical software systems. Therefore, developing safety-critical software requires a more systematic software and safety engineering process that enables the software and safety engineers to recognize the potential software risks. For this purpose, this dissertation introduces a comprehensive safety engineering approach based on STPA for Software-Intensive Systems, called STPA SwISs, which provides seamless STPA safety analysis and software safety verification activities to allow the software and safety engineers to work together during the software development for safety-critical systems and help them to recognize the associated software risks at the system level.

Asim Abdulkhaleq is a research assistant at the software engineering group in the software technology institute at Stuttgart University. Recently, Mr. Abdulkhaleq has finished his Ph.D. dissertation under supervision of Prof. Dr. rer. nat. Stefan Wagner, Stuttgart University, Germany and Prof. Dr. Nancy Leveson, MIT, USA. His research interests includes safety engineering for software-intensive systems. In 2012, he has gained his M.Sc degree in Information Technology from University of Stuttgart with a master thesis titled "Development of a conception for accessible human-machine-interaction of automation systems using patterns" at the automation and software engineering institute, University of Stuttgart. In 2005, Mr. Abdulkhaleq has gained his B.Sc. degree in computer science. His Bachelor thesis project was "Using computer networks through mobile (SMS Manager Query System)"