Abstract
Software criticality analysis examines the degree of contribution that each individual failure mode of a software component has on the reliability of software. Higher safety integrity levels are assigned to software modules whose failures cause an unacceptable impact on the operation of the system, and these levels require the implementation of more rigorous software quality assurance measures as defined in IEEE Std 1012 and in the customer’s system requirements specification. In this paper, a novel software criticality analysis method is proposed, the results of which can be used to guide the development of newly developed software and the procurement of Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) software. The software structure is first analyzed and the software is divided into modules according to their functions. Then the criticality levels of software components are preliminarily classified by means of a safety criticality preliminary analysis tree, followed by their verification through the software hazard and operability analysis (HAZOP). Finally, the target Safety Integrity Level (SIL) of each software module is determined based on its criticality level and the overall safety objective (i. e., SIL) of the system it resides in. As an example, this proposed method is applied to a nuclear power plant safety-critical system to demonstrate the detail application process and to verify the feasibility of the method. Compared with the existing software criticality analysis methods, this method has better operability and verifiability, and can be utilized as a technical guidance for the software criticality analysis of nuclear power plant digital control systems.
Abstract
Die Software-Kritikalitätsanalyse untersucht den Grad des Beitrags, den jeder einzelne Fehlermodus einer Softwarekomponente zur Zuverlässigkeit der Software hat. Höhere Sicherheitsintegritätsstufen werden Softwaremodulen zugewiesen, deren Fehler eine inakzeptable Auswirkung auf den Betrieb des Systems haben, und diese Stufen erfordern die Umsetzung strengerer Softwarequalitätssicherungsmaßnahmen, wie sie in IEEE Std 1012 und in der Systemanforderungsspezifikation des Kunden definiert sind. In diesem Beitrag wird eine neuartige Methode zur Analyse der Softwarekritikalität vorgeschlagen, deren Ergebnisse als Richtschnur für die Entwicklung neu entwickelter Software und die Beschaffung von kommerzieller Software (COTS) dienen können. Zunächst wird die Softwarestruktur analysiert und die Software entsprechend ihrer Funktionen in Module unterteilt. Dann werden die Kritikalitätsstufen der Softwarekomponenten mit Hilfe eines vorläufigen Kritikalitätsanalysebaums vorläufig eingestuft, gefolgt von ihrer Überprüfung durch die Software-Gefahren- und Betriebsfähigkeitsanalyse (HAZOP). Schließ-lich wird der angestrebte Sicherheitsintegritätsgrad (SIL) jedes Softwaremoduls auf der Grundlage seines Kritikalitätsgrads und des Gesamtsicherheitsziels (d. h. SIL) des Systems, in dem es sich befindet, bestimmt. Als Beispiel wird diese Methode auf ein sicherheitskritisches System eines Kernkraftwerks ange-wandt, um den detaillierten Anwendungsprozess zu demonstrieren und die Machbarkeit der Methode zu überprüfen. Im Vergleich zu den bestehenden Methoden der Softwarekritikalitätsanalyse weist diese Methode eine bessere Bedienbarkeit und Verifizierbarkeit auf und kann als technischer Leitfaden für die Softwarekritikalitätsanalyse digitaler Kontrollsysteme in Kernkraftwerken verwendet werden.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback, which will help us improve this paper. This work was supported by the Development Foundation of College of Energy, Xiamen University [2017NYFZ01].
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