Automation solutions are advancing further and further into various areas of life. This is already true for industrial manufacturing, and can increasingly be observed in home automation and medical care. In the future, highly automated assistants will cooperate with humans closer than ever. To avoid harm, it is crucial to incorporate safety mechanisms into the software of these assistants.
To improve the functional safety of a technical system’s software, the common approach today is to manually add code that implements safety mechanisms to existing source code. The manual addition of safety code
- risks introducing flaws into the functional code of the software (which may lead to physical harm in the worst case),
- increases code complexity,
- significantly prolongs development time, and
- makes the code harder to grasp than the functional code alone
The Universal Safety Format (USF) was created to improve this situation. USF formally defines functional safety mechanisms and a language to automatically weave them into system models and source code. What has been a time consuming, error-prone manual task can now be automated.
The format enables users to pick safety mechanisms from a library (e.g., a Dual Modular Redundancy pattern), and specify the locations in the code where the mechanism should be weaved in. A USF tool then adds the pattern’s safety code to the existing code automatically.
See USF in action!
The gist of USF is automatic weaving of safety mechanisms in models and code. Learn how the transformation engine works.
Learn about tools for USF!
USF is a fairly new format. Nevertheless, a couple of tools which support USF are already showing up. Check out the tools section!
Join the discussion!
USF is being developed by the SAFE4I research project consortium, supported by the German BMBF. Visit the SAFE4I website and learn more!
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