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Reasoning with Failures

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Formal Methods and Software Engineering (ICFEM 2020)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 12531))

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Abstract

Safety Instrumented Systems (SIS) protect major hazard facilities, e.g. power plants, against catastrophic accidents. An SIS consists of hardware components and a controller software – the “program”. Current safety analyses of SIS’ include the construction of a fault tree, summarising potential faults of the components and how they can arise within an SIS. The exercise of identifying faults typically relies on the experience of the safety engineer. Unfortunately the program part is often too complicated to be analysed in such a “by hand” manner and so the impact it has on the resulting safety analysis is not accurately captured. In this paper we demonstrate how a formal model for faults and failure modes can be used to analyse the impact of an SIS program. We outline the underlying concepts of Failure Mode Reasoning and its application in safety analysis, and we illustrate the ideas on a practical example.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    In this paper the term program refers to the software code run by SIS CPU; also known in safety standards as SIS Application Program [16].

  2. 2.

    Note that in Fig. 2b the FMR analysis would produce a different result, i.e. \((o \text { being} \textsf {f}~\text {by fault}) \Rightarrow (i_1 \text { reads too low}) \wedge (i_2 \text { reads too low})\).

  3. 3.

    In our abstract model we use a single type \(\mathcal{V}\) for simplicity of presentation.

  4. 4.

    Note here that we are distinguishing the types in the example.

  5. 5.

    More precisely we would define failure modes separately on inputs and outputs, and indeed this is what happens in practice. To simplify the presentation however we assume that there is a single partition which serves to define failure modes on a single set, without distinguishing between inputs and outputs.

  6. 6.

    Recall that for simplicity we assume that the function modes \({\mathcal {P}}\) applies to both functions f and g.

  7. 7.

    We do not treat non-termination nor partial functions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia

    Hamid Jahanian & Annabelle McIver

Authors
  1. Hamid Jahanian
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  2. Annabelle McIver
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Correspondence to Hamid Jahanian .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore

    Shang-Wei Lin

  2. School of Information and Communication Technology, Griffith University, Nathan Campus, QLD, Australia

    Zhe Hou

  3. Defence Science and Technology Group, Denver, CO, USA

    Brendan Mahony

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Jahanian, H., McIver, A. (2020). Reasoning with Failures. In: Lin, SW., Hou, Z., Mahony, B. (eds) Formal Methods and Software Engineering. ICFEM 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12531. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63406-3_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63406-3_3

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