Special Issue on SAFECOMP'11

This special issue includes extended and revised papers selected among the best contributions of the 30th International Conference on Computer Safety Reliability and Security (SAFECOMP'11), which was held in Naples (Italy) from the 19th to the 22nd of September 2011. SAFECOMP is an annual event created by the European Workshop on Industrial Computer Systems Technical Committee 7 on Safety, Reliability and Security (EWICS TC7). The relevant industrial component in SAFECOMP is demonstrated by the topics of the papers selected for this special issue, with a strong focus on model-based methods which can be concretely applied in the automotive, nuclear, railway and aerospace domains, as witnessed by the case-studies provided. The described approaches stress the importance of adopting model-driven engineering, meta-modeling, Domain Specific Languages (DSLs) and tool-chains as one of the key success factors and leading trends to transfer recent theoretical and methodological achievements to industrial settings, in order to make them easily employable, with most of the inner complexity hidden to the end users. The paper by Bernardi, Flammini, Marrone, Mazzocca, Merseguer, Nardone and Vittorini, entitled ‘Enabling the Usage of UML in the Verification of Railway Systems: the DAM-Rail Approach’ addresses the need for integration of model-based verification into industrial processes. It specifically addresses the definition of a Model-Driven approach for the evaluation of RAM attributes in railway applications to automatically generate formal models. The authors extend the MARTE-DAM UML profile with concepts related to maintenance aspects and service degradation, and show by appropriate case-studies that the MARTE-DAM framework can be specialized to the railway domain. The paper by Kang, Enoiu, Marinescu, Seceleanu, Schobbens and Pettersson, entitled ‘A Methodology for Formal Analysis and Verification of EAST-ADL models’ addresses the issue of guaranteeing that an architectural model meets the specified requirements in order to detect software flaws early in the development process. The authors present a formal modeling and verification methodology for safety-critical automotive products that are originally described in the domain specific architectural language EAST-ADL, demonstrating that the approach improves the modeling and verification capability of EAST-ADL and identifies dependencies, as well as potential conflicts between different automotive functions before implementation. The paper by Lee, Yoo, and Lee, entitled ‘A Systematic Verification of Behavioral Consistency between FBD Design and ANSI-C Implementation Using HW-CBMC’, addresses controllers in safety-critical systems such as nuclear power plants which often use Function Block Diagrams (FBD) to design software embedded in the PLC (Programmable Logic Controller). The authors propose a verification process which can efficiently verify correctness using model-checking techniques. In particular, the model-checker formally verifies the behavioral consistency between FBD and ANSI-C programs, according to the proposed process and templates. The authors present a CASE tool that they have developed and applied to the case-study of a nuclear reactor protection system. The paper by Mader, Armengaud, Griessnig, Kreiner, Steger and Weiss, entitled ‘OASIS: an Automotive Analysis and Safety Engineering Instrument’, describes a novel software tool named OASIS which supports automotive safety engineering with features allowing the creation of consistent and complete work products and to simplify and automate workflow steps from early analysis through system development to software development. More precisely, OASIS provides support for model creation and reuse, analysis and documentation, configuration and code generation. The approach is applied to FTA and FMEA of a hybrid electric vehicle development. The paper by Tiassou, Kanoun, Kaâniche, Seguin, and Papadopoulos, entitled ‘Aircraft Operational Reliability—a Model-based Approach and a Case Study’, addresses the assessment of aircraft operational reliability to support maintenance planning during the mission achievement. To that aim, the authors have developed a modeling approach, based on a meta-model that is used as a basis to structure the information needed to assess aircraft operational reliability and to build a stochastic model that can be tuned dynamically, in order to take into account the aircraft system operational state, a mission profile and the maintenance facilities available at the flight stop locations involved in the mission. A case study, based on an aircraft subsystem, is considered using Stochastic Activity Networks. Finally, we are grateful to Francesca Saglietti, Sandro Bologna, Roberto Setola and all the SAFECOMP co-organizers, EWICS members, chairmen and reviewers who contributed to the development of this post-conference special-issue. We hope you will find the content interesting and useful to innovate your job tasks and help bias your future research objectives.