Integrating metrics in an ontological framework supporting SW-FMEA

Abstract—The development process of safety-critical systems benefits from the early identification of failures affecting them. Several techniques have been designed in order to face this issue, among them Failure Mode Effect Analysis (FMEA). Although FMEA has been mainly thought for hardware systems, the increasing responsibilities assigned to software (SW) have fostered its application to SW as well (SW-FMEA), exacerbating the complexity of the analysis. Ontologies have been proposed as a way to formalize the SW-FMEA process and to give precise semantics to the involved concepts and data. We present a framework, based on an ontological model, which, beyond other capabilities, supports the collection of SW metrics enabling automatic identification of SW components not attaining the required level of assurance.