Model-based safety architecture framework for complex systems

The shift to transparency and rising need of the general public for safety, together with the increasing complexity and interdisciplinarity of modern safety-critical Systems of Systems (SoS) have resulted in a Model-Based Safety Architecture Framework (MBSAF) for capturing and sharing architectural knowledge in safety engineering of safety-critical SoS. This study attempts to redress the gap between the need to improve knowledge sharing during the establishment of a safety case and the missing centralization of safety in any architecture framework in the systems engineering domain. For this purpose, we adapt the A3 Architecture Overview (A3) tool. Requirements are extracted from safety standards, and two A3s are verified and validated with various stakeholders through an iterative process. This MBSAF for complex systems results in increasing and effective interaction between stakeholders, more overview for managing safety complexity, more insight into finding required safety information, and therefore; an increasing efficiency in safety engineering