A case study using a protocol to derive safety functional requirements from Fault Tree Analysis

Abstract

State-of-the-art in Requirements Engineering offers many frameworks and techniques to enable requirements engineers in their work. However, for critical systems there are gaps in state-of-the-art, and these can result in dire consequences, potentially putting lives in danger and damage infrastructure and threaten the environment. A well known technique used to help requirements engineers to understand safety hazards situations in the context of safety-critical software is Fault Tree Analysis (FTA). This technique is a good one to decompose hazards identified in the system context into events that may put the system functionalities in risk. However, FTA does not offer a protocol of how to derive safety functional requirements from fault trees. In this paper we present a case study adopting a protocol to help requirements engineers to derive safety functional requirements from FTA. The proposed protocol was based on a study performed in a Brazilian company in the area of electronic medical devices. The development of prototype of a low cost insulin infusion pump, which is a critical system, offered the basis to propose and test a protocol to derive safety functional requirements from FTA. During the case study we collected evidences that help us to discuss if FTA is sufficient to guide software engineers to implement the corresponding control software and also if FTA offers enough information to help requirements engineers to derive safety functional requirements.