A semantic driven approach for consistency verification between requirements and FMEA

Consistency within the system life cycle is difficult to guarantee, due to the cross of different skills and requirements, often expressed by means of different languages. In particular, in safety-critical systems consistency between software requirements and safety analysis requires checks to guarantee that safety engineer needs are feasible and implemented by the system. Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA) is a systematic technique to analyze the failure modes of components, evaluating their impact and their mitigation actions, which are procedures to be implemented by operators or by the system itself (usually by the software). Although the actual efforts to centralize system information in a structured way, safety analysis is not tied in a structured manner to other systems, in particular to software. This paper proposes an automatic approach to check consistency between FMEA and software requirements with a bit effort of formalization. The approach models FMEA and software requirements with Resource Description Framework (RDF) triplets and checks their consistency on the basis of consistency rules.