Abstract: Safety-critical systems are often subject to a safety assessment process, aimed at providing assurance that these systems meet their safety goals without posing undue harm to people, property, or the environment. A significant fraction of the development costs in safety-critical systems is incurred over activities that concern assessment. This makes it paramount to develop credible and yet efficient techniques for performing safety assessments.
In this talk, I will summarize our recent research on two threads related to safety assessment: I will first present an approach that enables analysts to quantitatively ascertain the satisfaction of safety objectives through probabilistic simulation. In the second part of the talk, I will focus on the safety evidence that underlies goal satisfaction arguments and describe an approach to systematize the specification and collection of this evidence. Both research threads use Model-Driven Engineering as their basis. Specifically, we use goal model in the first thread for the elaboration of safety objectives and performing simulations, and uses UML technologies in the second thread for specification and transformation of evidence information.
Dr. Mehrdad Sabetzadeh is currently a Research Scientist at the Simula Research Laboratory, Norway. He received his PhD from the University of Toronto, Canada in 2008 and worked as a Research Fellow at University College London, UK in 2009. His main research area is software engineering with specific interests in model-based development and requirements engineering. In recent years, Sabetzadeh's research has focused primarily on the modelling, verification, and assessment of safety-critical systems. Sabetzadeh is the recipient or co-recipient of a number of awards, including an NSERC Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Government of Canada, an ACM SIGSOFT distinguished paper award at the 29th International Conference on Software Engineering, and a best paper award at the 13th IEEE International High Assurance Systems Engineering Symposium.