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Identifying Safety Hazards: An Experimental Comparison of System Diagrams and Textual Use Cases

  • Conference paper
Enterprise, Business-Process and Information Systems Modeling (BPMDS 2012, EMMSAD 2012)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing ((LNBIP,volume 113))

Abstract

As ICT is increasingly used in critical systems, safety is a growing concern. Safety hazards should be discovered and handled at an early stage of IS development, since it is much more expensive to redesign a system post hoc due to threats that were initially overlooked. It is therefore interesting to integrate safety analysis with textual and diagrammatic specifications used in mainstream system development. This paper reports on an experiment comparing how well system diagrams and textual uses cases support the identification of hazards in a simple railway control system. The two most important conclusions are that textual uses cases are as good as or better than system diagrams for hazard identification in all cases except for peripheral equipment and that including system diagrams in the documentation is not enough − they must be brought into focus for the analysis.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway

    Tor Stålhane & Guttorm Sindre

Authors
  1. Tor Stålhane
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  2. Guttorm Sindre
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. IbisSoft AB, Stockholm, Box 19567, SE-10432, Stockholm, Sweden

    Ilia Bider

  2. LogicBlox, Australia, and INTI International University, Malaysia

    Terry Halpin

  3. Department of Computer and Information Science, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Sem Sælands Vei 7-9, 7491, Trondheim, Norway

    John Krogstie

  4. University Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne, Paris, France

    Selmin Nurcan

  5. Erik Proper, PRC Henri Tudor, Luxembourg-Kirchberg, Luxembourg

    Erik Proper

  6. Aalen University, Aalen, Germany

    Rainer Schmidt

  7. University of Haifa, Carmel Mountain, 31905, Haifa, Israel

    Pnina Soffer

  8. Department of Business Informatics, University of Gdansk, ul. Piaskowa 9, 81-864, Sopot, Poland

    Stanisław Wrycza

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Stålhane, T., Sindre, G. (2012). Identifying Safety Hazards: An Experimental Comparison of System Diagrams and Textual Use Cases. In: Bider, I., et al. Enterprise, Business-Process and Information Systems Modeling. BPMDS EMMSAD 2012 2012. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 113. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-31072-0_26

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-31072-0_26

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-31071-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-31072-0

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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