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The hazard concept has been extensively used in the literature and defined in an informal way, which serves as a guidance on identifying the potential hazards during the development of safety-critical systems. Intuitively, the definitions seem to be consistent and easy to understand. However, when we take a closer look at these definitions, ambiguities may arise, and real-world semantics need to be defined. In this work, we propose a hazard domain ontology, i.e., the Hazard Ontology (HO), to provide an ontological interpretation of hazard. To tackle the aforementioned issues, the HO is grounded in the Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO) to utilize the benefits provided by taking foundational concepts into account. Finally, we show some useful findings when we use the proposed ontology to analyze the hazard descriptions from an industrial passenger train project.

Hazard identification is an essential but very de- manding task for the development of safety-critical systems (SCSs). Current practices suffer from one or several drawbacks listed below: 1) a common hazard conceptualization is missing and thereby ambiguities may arise and, 2) there is still a need to formalize the experience of analysts and lessons learned from previous system development in a structured way to facilitate future reuse. and, 3) some hazard identification techniques require well-known system behaviors represented by models, such as automata and sequence diagrams, to identify hazards, and however such models are typically susceptible to changes or even not available in early stages. In this paper, we propose an ontological approach to support hazard identification in the early stages of the development of SCSs. The approach aims to improve hazard identification results in terms of completeness and unambiguity. A robotic strolling assistant system is used to evaluate the proposed approach.

Preliminary hazard analysis (PHA) is a key safety-concerned technique, applied in early stages of safety critical systems development, aiming to provide stakeholders with a general understanding of potential hazards together with their causes. Various studies have asserted that most significant flaws in hazard analysis techniques are related to the omission of causes associated with the identified hazards. In addition, identified causes are sometimes described in too generic terms to provide useful guidance for subsequent activities. In this paper, we propose an approach to explore and identify the causes associated with the hazards from a PHA, aiming to improve the results of hazard causes identification in terms of completeness and usefulness. To achieve the goal, the proposed approach utilizes the hazard-related concepts and relations defined in a hazard domain ontology presented in our previous work. Furthermore, an application scenario of a train control system is used to evaluate our approach.

Safety requirements describe risk mitigations against failures that may cause catastrophic consequences on human life, environment and facilities. To be able to implement the correct risk mitigations, it is fundamental that safety requirements are de- fined based on the results issued from the safety analysis. In this paper, we introduce a heuristic approach to elicit safety requirements based on the knowledge about hazard’s causes, hazard’s sources and hazard’s consequences (i.e. hazard’s components) acquired during the safety analysis. The proposed approach is based on a Hazard Ontology that is used to structure the knowledge about the hazards identified during the safety analysis in order to make it available and accessible for requirements elicitation. We describe how this information can be used to elicit safety requirements, and provide a guidance to derive the safety requirements which are appropriate to deal with the hazards they mitigate.

Preliminary hazard analysis (PHA) is a key safety-concerned activity, applied during the early stages of safety-critical systems development process, aiming to provide stakeholders with a general understanding of potential hazards. The identified hazards will be described and serve as a basis to further identify mitigation mechanisms in the subsequent development process. However, since various stakeholders will be involved in the identification process, a common understanding of the nature of hazards among stakeholders, such as what a hazard consists of and how to describe it without ambiguities, is of crucial importance to achieve the goal of PHA. In this work, we propose a hazard modeling language (HML) based on a hazard domain ontology, i.e., the Hazard Ontology, in order to facilitate the specification of identified hazards. In addition, we present an approach to the transformation from natural language hazard descriptions into the HML specification. Finally, an industrial PHA example is used to illustrate the usefulness of our work.