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The use of contracts to enhance the maintainability of safety-critical systems has received a significant amount of research effort in recent years. However some key issues have been identified: the difficulty in dealing with the wide range of properties of systems and deriving contracts to capture those properties; and the challenge of dealing with the inevitable incompleteness of the contracts. In this paper, we explore how the derivation of contracts can be performed based on the results of failure analysis. We use the concept of safety kernels to alleviate the issues. Firstly the safety kernel means that the properties of the system that we may wish to manage can be dealt with at a more abstract level, reducing the challenges of representation and completeness of the “safety” contracts. Secondly the set of safety contracts is reduced so it is possible to reason about their satisfaction in a more rigorous manner.

Developers of some safety critical systems construct a safety case. Developers changing a system during development or after release must analyse the change's impact on the safety case. Evidence might be invalidated by changes to the system design, operation, or environmental context. Assumptions valid in one context might be invalid elsewhere. The impact of change might not be obvious. This paper proposes a method to facilitate safety case maintenance by highlighting the impact of changes.

A safety case contains safety arguments together with supporting evidence that together should demonstrate that a system is acceptably safe. System changes pose a challenge to the soundness and cogency of the safety case argument. Maintaining safety arguments is a painstaking process because it requires performing a change impact analysis through interdependent elements. Changes are often performed years after the deployment of a system making it harder for safety case developers to know which parts of the argument are affected. Contracts have been proposed as a means for helping to manage changes. There has been significant work that discusses how to represent and to use them but there has been little on how to derive them. In this paper, we propose a sensitivity analysis approach to derive contracts from Fault Tree Analyses and use them to trace changes in the safety argument, thus facilitating easier maintenance of the safety argument. 

Safety cases need significant amount of time and effort to produce. The required amount of time and effort can be dramatically increased due to system changes as safety cases should be maintained before they can be submitted for certification or re-certification. Anticipating potential changes is useful since it reveals traceable consequences that will eventually reduce the maintenance efforts. However, considering a complete list of anticipated changes is difficult. What can be easier though is to determine the flexibility of system components to changes. Using sensitivity analysis is useful to measure the flexibility of the different system properties to changes. Furthermore, contracts have been proposed as a means for facilitating the change management process due to their ability to record the dependencies among system’s components. In this paper, we extend a technique that uses a sensitivity analysis to derive safety contracts from Fault Tree Analyses (FTA) and uses these contracts to trace changes in the safety argument. The extension aims to enabling the derivation of hierarchical and correlated safety contracts.We motivate the extension through an illustrative example within which we identify limitations of the technique and discuss potential solutions to these limitations.